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PORTUGAL 

OLD AND NEW 



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POETUGAL 



OLD AND NEW 



BY 



OSWALD CEAWFUED 

HER MAJESTY'S CONSUL AT OPOP.TO 
AUTHOR OP 'LATOUCBE'S TRAVELS IN PORTUGAL 



Wtlr Pus an* Illustrations 




LONDON 
C. KEGAN PAUL & CO., 1 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 

1880 



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('/'*. !•///*/.< of trandation mid of reproduction are reserved) 



PREFACE. 

This book is partly made up of contributions to the 
' Fortnightly Keview,' the ' New Quarterly Magazine,' 
and the ; Cornhill Magazine.' I have modified these 
papers greatly, interpolated much new matter, cor- 
rected where my knowledge has increased, and in 
many, I may say in most parts, I have altogether 
rewritten my first essays. 

I have called my book 4 Portugal : Old and New,' 
hoping thereby to make the title as descriptive as I 
could. I trust the name may not be thought preten- 
tious, or the book altogether a nondescript, or the 
chapters of it disjointed. 

I am afraid the title may to some critics seem to 
promise a great deal more than I have performed. 
Portugal, Old and New, may indeed be taken to mean 
an account of all that Portugal has been and all that 
she now is ; but this of course would be an impossible 
expectation to fulfil with a work in one volume. 1 



vi PREFACE. 

hope the reader expects nothing from rne so exhaus- 
tive or so ponderous. 

My book is so far nondescript that it is neither a 
book of history, nor of criticism, nor of pure descrip- 
tion ; nor an antiquarian work, nor a social nor a sta- 
tistical one, nor a book of travel ; but it is a medley 
of all these things, and yet, if I have only succeeded 
in carrying out my conception, it is not disjointed. 

In the inns of the more uncivilized parts of this 
Peninsula it is common to offer to the travel- 
ler, not a dinner of separate courses, but one where 
they are mingled and compounded into a single dish. 
A large, deep pipkin is set before him, in which meat 
and game and fowl of all available kinds, vegetables 
of every variety, pot herbs and garnishing and spices, 
have been seethed all together. Into this pipkin, or 
QUq, the guest dips a spoon at a venture and, perhaps 
half famished with long fasting and eager for meat or 
game, he is disappointed at drawing forth nothing 
more satisfying than a piece of yellow gourd or a 
scarlet capsicum. On the other hand, the fastidious 
traveller, trifling with his Olla and diving for the 
lightest sustenance, may get a more substantial morsel 
of beef or bacon than he cares for. 

The reader of my book may, I fear, meet with ill 
luck of the same kind. There is reading in it that 



PREFACE. ¥11 

may seem over-heavy for some tastes, and reading that 
may seem too light for the tastes of others. 

As a sample of solid ingredients there is the 
chapter on the great Warrior King of Portugal, and 
this perhaps is very heavy reading ; but then, not to 
know about him is to be ignorant of all that concerns 
the rise of Portugal into the category of nations. 
Before Affonso Henriquez there was no Portugal at 
all. Since he lived and died, and because he lived, 
there has been in this corner of Europe an enduring 
kingdom which, in spite of its size, is in the true sense 
of the word a great kingdom. 

Again, no account of Portugal can approach com- 
pleteness which omits mention of the rise and pro- 
gress of its literature, and tells nothing of its agricul- 
ture ; for the nation is an essentially literary nation, 
and its agriculture has at all times been the source of 
its strength and its greatness. On both subjects I 
have only written after long and close study at first 
hand. 

I suppose that when an educated foreigner comes 
to a country which is strange to him and with which 
he wishes to acquaint himself, he would first set to 
work by learning something of its early history, of its 
literature, of its chief industries, of the manners and 
habits of the people, of their government, of the physi- 



Vlll PREFACE. 

cal aspects of the land and its antiquities; then, if 
he had the opportunity, he would travel a little over 
the country and see what he could with his own eyes. 
I have myself done something of all this, and in the 
following pages I have tried as well as I could to put 
before others the result of what I have learned. 

OSWALD CRAWFUBD. 
Opokto: Christmas, 1879. 



CONTENTS. 

HAPTER PAGE 

I. The Rise of Portugal ..... 1 

II. The First King of Portugal . . . . 31 

III. The Poetry of the Portuguese Renaissance . 61 

IV. Modern Portugal : Country Life and Sport . 107 
V. Farming and Farm People . . . .146 

VI. Port Wine .218 

VII. A Portuguese Troy . . . . . . 268 

VIII. The Lost City of Citania 307 

IX. A Portuguese Colony . . . . . 340 

X. Customs of the Portuguese People . . . 360 

XI. Conclusion . 382 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

PAGE 

The Queen's Stairs at OroRTO . . . . Frontispiece 

A Sketch Map showing Northern Spain and Portugal 
with the asturian mountains and their klver 
System . 5 

Old House in Oporto. Period op King Affonso Henriquez 30 

Chapel near Guimaraens, where Affonso Henriquez is said 

to hate been christened . . 60 

Cloisters of Belem Content: Renaissance Period . .106 

Country House, Portugal 145 

A Sketch Map of Setubal and Ruins of Troia . . 281 

Church Plate in Braga Cathedral 339 

A Madeira Fisherman 359 

Map of Portugal . . .--■'■.. . . at end of volume 



PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW, 



CHAPTEE I. 

THE RISE OF PORTUGAL. 

There is in human nature a craving for something 
beyond the mere chronicling of great deeds. In rude 
times, amid the selfish struggle of the more masterful 
passions of men, heroic or generous actions possess 
an impressiveness which strongly affects the sympa- 
thies of contemporaries ; but such deeds do not 
always succeed in reaching down to the knowledge 
of succeeding generations, for it is unfortunate that a 
rare coincidence of poet and hero should be indis- 
pensable for any effectual tradition of renown, and 
that either without the other's help runs no small 
peril of oblivion. In primitive ages, the imagination 
of poets seems to be finite. There is no instance of a 
ballad-monger or early poet having evolved a hero. 
To most thoughtful men, Homer's poems are evidence 
enough that great deeds were done before Troy ; and 
if we had no better voucher for the heroism of 
Ruy Dias, El Campeador, the hero of Spanish mediaeval 

/ B 



2 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

romance, we might be content to find one in the 
great epic of ' The Cid.' 

King Alfonso Henriquez, who carved out with his 
sword a kingdom which his descendants still rule, 
was perhaps as great a hero as the Cid himself, but 
only a vague rumour of his exploits has come down 
to us. Vate sacro caret ; he has lacked the meed of 
poet's song. The two warriors, the Cid and Affonso 
Henriquez, lived within a generation of each other ; 
both fought chiefly against the same powerful enemy, 
in the same age of chivalry ; but while Buy Dias 
missed the purpose of his life, Alfonso Henriquez 
attained the great end he had set to himself. While 
the mark made upon the age by the Spanish cham- 
pion was obliterated even in his own lifetime, the 
achievements of the Portuguese conqueror have 
changed the whole course of Peninsular history, and 
established a dynasty which survives to this day ; — 
an impressive monument, among the shifting elements 
of Peninsular history, of the daring and wisdom of its 
founder. Yet what avails it to a man to have done 
great deeds, to live a great life, and to win a wide 
renown, if the chief part of his fame is to die with the 
death of the witnesses of his exploits, and only to find 
a short record in the stupid annals of monkish and 
Moorish chroniclers ? A noble life is rare enough in 
the world to make us regret that the story of one 
should be so nearly extinguished. 

I shall endeavour in the following pages to revive 
so much of the life and doings of King Alfonso Henri- 
quez as can be extracted from the scanty annals of 



THE EISE OF PORTUGAL. 3 

the chroniclers, Spanish, Portuguese, and Moorish, 
that have survived the seven hundred years which 
have elapsed since his death. 

The two schools of modern history at present 
most in vogue might find a very promising battle-field 
in the fife of this great Portuguese King and Con- 
queror. A writer of the one school might argue that 
King Affonso was forced by the tendencies of his age 
to the course he followed ; while a historian of the 
opposite type might contend that the King's will and 
strong individuality had impressed themselves on the 
minds of his contemporaries, and had warped their 
wills to compliance with his own. Profounder in- 
quirers will reject both theories as being thoroughly 
insufficient, and, discerning a clear expression of the 
great law of historical progression even in the scanty 
records of the early. annalists, they will perceive that 
the changes in the community, both moral and politi- 
cal, were surely and irresistibly evolved from modifi- 
cations of the opinions and habits and sentiments of 
the people. Nevertheless, had this warrior prince, 
the founder of an enduring nationality, been less of a 
true leader of men, Portugal would probably have 
shared the evanescent fate of the contemporary Pen- 
insular kingdoms ; and so also would King Affonso 
Henri quez have lost the labour of his life, had he not 
had to deal with a people singularly apt alike for the 
arts of war and peace, and had he not lived in an age 
when all the components of society were ready to be 
forced into fresh combinations by a strong will and a 
strong hand, 

b 2 



4 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

It is hardly necessary at this day to repeat at any 
length the history of the recovery of the Peninsula 
from the Moslem invaders. Nevertheless, to remind 
the reader of the state of the north-west part of 
the Peninsula during the eleventh century, and to 
give a slight sketch of the nature of the country 
itself, may serve to make what is to follow more 
clear and more interesting. 

If we look at any fairly good map of Spain, we 
shall see that in the extreme north of the Peninsula 
the province of Asturias is almost wholly occupied, as 
well as the art of the map-maker can represent such 
features, by frequent, and lofty, and precipitous 
mountains. If the map be correctly drawn, the hills 
will appear with a gradual rise from the sea cliffs 
washed by the waters of the Bay of Biscay, till they 
tower, at the extreme south of the province, into a 
mountain range whose highest peaks are snow-capped 
for almost the whole year, and whose southern wall- 
like declivities face the modern province of Leon. If 
we look closer, we shall perceive — sure sign that 
these mountain ranges overtop those in the surround- 
ing country — that the numerous streams and rivers 
taking their rise in the Asturian mountain system 
flow, some of them towards the west, some to the 
east, and some to the south ; forming in each case 
great water arteries, which, both geographically and 
politically, have at all times exercised an extreme 
importance upon the history of Northern Spain and 
Portugal. 

The Ebro, rising in or near the eastern spurs of 



THE RISE OF PORTUGAL. 5 

the Asturian ranges, flows south-eastward to the 
Mediterranean, and divided, in early times, the 
Navarrese mountaineers from those of the Asturias 
and from the people of the plain country to the 
south ; just as it has formed, more than once within 
the present century, a natural boundary between 
liberal Spain and absolutist Carlism. 





M" Santiago UV AS . tU ^. aS - . „. 

GalicjaJ <# ^on I ■ lL ^ 

==^ GuimaraeM ^^■•-'-^Av'aiiadoltf 



The streams of the western Asturian watershed, 
meeting in the river Minho, flow due west to the 
Atlantic, separating modern Galicia from Portugal, 
and formed in mediaeval times the boundary line 
which sometimes restrained Saracen invasion of the 
northern region, and sometimes Galician aggression 
towards the south. 

The waters that flow to the south from the Astu- 
rian mountains are more numerous, and the streams 
fuller, than those running east and west. They meet, 
in time, to form the great river Douro, whose tribu- 
taries, sweeping in broad semicircles through what 
was the ancient kingdom of Leon, wash the walls of 
many cities famous in Moorish and Spanish history 



6 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

— of Leon and Zamora, of Carrion, Burgos, and 
Vallaclolid — and in time join their waters and enter 
Portuguese territory through the defiles and moun- 
tain valleys which lie along the frontier of Spain 
and Portugal. Flowing due west always, through a 
hilly and difficult coun'ry, the Douro is the chief 
water-way of northern Portugal — a deep and rapid 
river — and, entering the Atlantic, forms a harbour 
which possessed commercial importance before the 
invasion of the Eomans, and which, during the long 
period before the Moors had retreated from the 
southern portion of the kingdom, was the principal 
seat of Christian trade, as well as the key of the 
Christian position. It retained during these early 
times the designation Portus, first given to it by the 
Eomans, which is preserved in its modern name of 
Oporto. The hill fort of Cale * stood on the southern 
bank of the river, within two miles of the sea, and 
Portus Cale, or Portugal e, came to be the designa- 
tion of the adjacent district, and, in process of time, 
of the whole kingdom. 

The broad tract of mountainous country drained 
by these several rivers was the first battle-field of 
Christians and Mahometans, and here the great issue 
between the rival creeds and races was finally decided. 

1 Sir Charles Murray, recently our Minister at the Court of 
Lisbon, a gentleman intimately acquainted with the East, informs 
me that Cale is a pure Arabic relic, Calah signifying a ' castle ' or' 
'fort' — the last vowel of the word being the guttural a unpro- 
nounceable by European organs of speech. I do not think that 
any writer has noticed that Portugal is a word in part of Latin 
and in part of Arabic origin. 



THE RISE OF PORTUGAL. 7 

The tide of Moslem invasion, which had swept 
over every other part of the Peninsula with a resist- 
lessness and a rapidity characteristic of Arabian con- 
quest, broke when it reached the precipitous ranges 
of the Asturian mountains ; and a remnant of the 
Christian Visigoths, retreating among their recesses, 
preserved a perfect independence throughout the 
long Moslem domination over the rest of the Pen- 
insula. 

Asturias became a kingdom in 718, only ten 
years after the Mahometan subjugation of the re- 
mainder of the Peninsula ; and in the course of con- 
tention with the Saracens, the little kingdom enlarged 
its boundaries to the south and west, took in the 
richer territory of Leon on its southern frontier, and 
its monarch in time assumed the title of King of 
Leon. 

A little later, other Christian kingdoms began to 
emerge, as the wave of Moorish dominion retreated 
from the unprofitable regions of northern Spain. 
On the southern slopes of the Pyrenees , a Christian 
nation was forming itself under circumstances some- 
what similar to those in Asturias. Confined at first 
to the difficult country north of the Ebro, the Kings 
of Navarre and Aragon in process of time won the 
land to the south of that river ; and on the table- 
land of central Spain, Castile had also come into exist- 
ence as a kingdom. 

These Christian kingdoms by no means contented 
themselves with fighting against the common enemy, 
and warfare against each other was as frequent and as 



8 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

fierce as with the Saracens. Into the vicissitudes of 
these petty wars it is not necessary to enter here. 
Suffice it to say that Sancho, King of Navarre, at 
his death in 1035, had, by the fortune of war, come 
to reign over the principal portion of free Christian 
Spain. His sway included what is now French and 
Spanish Navarre, a part of modern Aragon, the 
great corn-growing upland plain which now is more 
or less included in the province of Old Castile, and 
some portion of the kingdom of Leon. 

This extensive realm was divided among three 
sons, the most notable of whom was Fernando, whose 
capacity for war and the kingly arts of intrigue and 
annexation elevates him somewhat conspicuously 
above the many warlike captains and rapacious 
sovereigns of that age and country, and has earned 
him the title of The Great. For Fernando the vice- 
royalty of Castile was, by the terms of his father's 
will, elevated into a kingdom ; and the new King 
almost immediately engaged in hostilities with the 
sovereign of Leon and Asturias, and won over him 
the bloodiest battle that had yet been fought in 
Christian Spain. The Leonese King fell, and Fernando 
forced himself upon the people of Leon, and assumed 
thereafter the title of King of Leon and Castile. 
Shortly afterwards, war broke out between Fernando 
and his brother the King of Navarre. Again was 
Fernando the victor. The King of Navarre died oh 
the field, his troops and his Saracen allies were com- 
pletely routed, and King Fernando's moderation, or 
his policy, was shown by his refusing the crown of 



THE RISE OF PORTUGAL. 9 

Navarre, thus easily within his grasp. He allowed 
his brother's son to succeed to the throne. 

The rest of King Fernando's life was occupied 
with raids, more or less successful, into Saracen 
Portugal in the east, and as far to the west as 
Valencia ; but these expeditions, depending for their 
success upon temporary dissensions among the Ma- 
hometans, were of no more lasting importance than 
the many other and similar marauding expeditions 
made by both Christian and Moslem in these ages 
into the heart of each other's possessions. With one 
exception : the Portuguese expedition yielded fruit 
in the conquest and occupation, in the year 1064, 1 of 
the city of Coimbra, in Portugal, an important strong- 
hold set in the midst of the rich and beautiful valley 
of the Mondego. In the following year King Fer- 
nando died, and, like his own father, divided his 
dominions among his children. 

I shall be forced to a somewhat fuller narrative 
of the events which followed upon this second parti- 
tion of the country, for in the vicissitudes and in the 
fortunes of the rough soldier-kings who divided King 
Fernando's dominions among them, are to be found 
the more immediate causes of the rise of the Portu- 
guese monarchy in the succeeding generation. 

The King left three sons and two daughters. 
Sancho, the eldest son, became King of Castile ; 
Alonso inherited the throne of Leon and of the 
Asturias ; for Garcia the north-western province of 

1 The date of this, the earliest important event in the history 
of Portugal, is much disputed. 



10 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

Galicia, which had hitherto been a viceroyalty, was 
made into a kingdom ; and the two daughters became 
titular Queens — the eldest, Urraca, of Zamora, and 
Elvira, of Touro. 

History is never so apt to the proverbial repetition 
of itself as in such rude times as these, where the 
passions of mankind are not complicated with the 
tastes and the repulsions, the convictions and the 
ideas, which a course of civilization and culture en- 
genders. The new partition of the country led, as it 
had done before, to dissension and to war. A bloody 
battle shortly took place between Alonso of Leon and 
his brother of Castile, and the battle went against the 
King of Leon ; but he retired to his capital unpursued 
by his brother. King Alonso, destined to high 
fortunes, was destined also to reach them through a 
series of strange reverses. A year or two afterwards 
hostilities again broke out ; and this time Alonso, 
assisted by a great body of Galician troops, probably 
furnished by his brother Garcia, won the day, but 
again the advantage was not decisive. 

It is on this occasion that the annalist corro- 
borates the romantic legend of the poets. Buy Dias, 
the Cid, was among the officers and counsellors of 
the defeated King Sancho. It is related that, after 
the battle, he advised his master to make a renewed 
attack by night upon the victorious Leonese. The 
stratagem was successful, and the Castilians in their 
turn gained the victory. King Alonso himself fell a 
prisoner, was carried in triumph to Burgos, the Cas- 
tilian capital, and was subsequently thrust into the 



THE RISE OF PORTUGAL. II 

Convent of Sahagun, and forced to assume the cowl. 
From this confinement the King of Leon escaped by 
the help of his sister Urraca, Queen of Zamora, and, 
flying to Toledo, he obtained the protection of 
the powerful Emir, Al-Mamon, the ancient ally of 
his father. 

The immediate result to Urraca of her favouring 
of the weaker brother was the siege of her capital 
Zamora by the offended San oho — a leaguer as famous 
in song as it was important in history ; for while the 
ballads recount the romantic prowess of the Cid, 
the chroniclers join with them in recording an event 
which led to a complete revolution in the affairs of 
northern Spain. A Zamoran knight, watching the 
hostile lines from the battlements of the city, saw 
King Sancho passing incautiously near to the walls, 
mounted his horse, set his spear in rest, and charged 
furiously upon the Castilian King. Sancho received 
a mortal wound, and the Zamoran knight returned 
unhurt into the city. The death of their leader dis- 
concerted the besiegers. The siege was raised, and 
Queen Urraca lost no time in communicating with her 
favourite brother, and advising him to claim the 
vacant throne. Alonso, hurrying from the Court of 
his Saracen host, received at Zamora the renewed 
allegiance of his former Leonese subjects. 

Alonso thus became, by his elder brother's death, 
King of Leon, of Castile, and — by the seizure of 
Garcia's kingdom — of Galicia, including, as this latter 
kingdom did, a large portion of northern Portugal. 
Almost the whole of his long reign was occupied with 



12 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW, 

war against the Saracens. Dissensions among the 
Moslem rulers of Spain, quite as much perhaps as 
their own warlike capacity, befriended the Christian 
soldiers and their chief. Toledo, the ancient seat of 
Visigoth rule, and now a centre of Moslem learning 
and government, fell into the King's hands, and 
became the capital of Leon and Castile. But that 
this ascendency of the Christians was not entirely 
due to the superiority of their arms, is proved clearly 
enough by the issue of the great battle of Zalaca, near 
Badajos. Here Alonso found himself opposed by the 
famous Almoravidian Emir Yusuf. Contemporary 
chroniclers, Moorish and Christian, have, no doubt, 
as usual, immensely exaggerated the numbers engaged 
on each side, but it is certain that the whole fighting 
power of the Peninsula, Christian and Moslem, met 
on the field of Zalaca ; and, what is significant of 
the curious state of the country, and is evidence that 
religion went for little in these early contests between 
men of the rival faiths, it is related that while bands 
of Christian knights had engaged themselves on the 
Emir's side, no less than thirty thousand Moslem 
troops fought under the banners of the Christian King. 
The battle raged all day, and by nightfall the 
Leonese and Castilian lines had been broken, the 
rout became complete, and, by the admission even 
of Christian chroniclers, the slaughter was enor- 
mous. Fortune, however, which had befriended 
King Alonso before, did not wholly desert him now. 
Tidings from his African home, requiring the imme- 
diate presence of Yusuf in Africa, reached the Almora- 



THE RISE OF PORTUGAL. 13 

vidian chief in the very hour of his victory. The 
prosecution of the campaign was left to a lieutenant, 
and the opportunity of curbing and perhaps of com- 
pletely crushing the power of the Christians in Spain 
was for the time lost to the Saracens. 

The latter part of King Alonso's reign and life 
was passed without any further great change of 
fortune. With the internal affairs of the Leonese 
monarchy we have now to concern ourselves. 

During the long wars of the eleventh century, 
the Christian Courts and camps of Spain had been at- 
tracting all that was adventurous in the chivalry of 
Europe. At the Court of King Alonso two French 
knights of the princely house of Burgundy had made 
their appearance. Count Eaymond and Count Henry 
were first cousins, and both princes quickly obtained 
the favour of the Leonese King. To Eaymond, the 
eldest, he gave in marriage Urraca, his daughter by 
Queen Constance ; on Count Henry he bestowed 
another and illegitimate daughter, Tareja, the child 
of Ximena Nunes, a Spanish lady of noble birth. To 
Count Eaymond he confided the important govern- 
ment of Galicia and Portugal, but the hands of the 
young Burgundian Count were by no means strong 
enough to retain a firm grasp on this outlying depen- 
dency. 

In the spring of 1095 Count Eaymond marched 
southward towards the Saracen frontier, gathering to 
his standard a large army, the flower of the Galician 
and Portuguese chivalry. He reached the Tagus, 
and entrenched himself in the peninsula formed by 



14 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

the Atlantic on one side and the broad estuary of the 
Tagus on the other — a spot which has since become 
memorable in military annals, as being that Avhereon 
Wellington formed the famous defensive lines of 
Torres Yedras. 

The troops of Count Eaymond, however, found no 
protection in the triple lines of hills which cross the 
neck of the peninsula. His troops were suddenly 
surrounded, says the Compostellan chronicler, by 
an immense multitude of Saracen fighting men, Eay- 
mond 's army was overthrown, and slaughter and 
captivity were the lot of the Christian warriors. 

It was no doubt in consequence of this reverse 
that Count Henry, the husband of the bastard Tarej a, 
was deemed fitter to hold the outlying province than 
his cousin ; and while Eaymond's viceroyalty was, 
shortly after his defeat, limited to the Galician 
province, Henry was made governor of the whole of 
Portugal between the Minho and the Tagus. 

During the first years of Count Henry's reign the 
storms of Saracen conflict were sweeping over 
southern and eastern Spain ; but the new ruler was 
probably engaged, to judge from the scanty mention 
of him by the chroniclers, rather in strengthening his 
own government than in any offensive action against 
the Moors. 

Count Eaymond died in 1107, and two years 
afterwards King Alonso also died, leaving his 
daughter Urraca, Eaymond's widow, then about 
nineteen years of age, the successor to the crown. 
She had one son, Alonso Eaimundes, a child of three, 



THE EISE OF PORTUGAL. 15 

and with the common testamentary fatuity of absolute 
sovereigns, the succession to the crown was to 
devolve upon this infant in case of the re-marriage 
of Urraca. The young widow lost little time in 
effecting this contingent reversion in her child's 
favour, by contracting a marriage with the neigh- 
bouring sovereign, Alonso of Aragon, a young prince 
whose activity in war had already obtained for him 
the title of El Lidador— The Warrior. With the full 
consent of the nobles, who expected to find in so war- 
like a prince a successful leader in their constant 
warfare with the Moors, Alonso El Lidador at once 
assumed the crown of Leon and Castile ; but the 
clergy opposed the marriage on the ground of con- 
sanguinity, and the distant province of Galicia, 
whither Urraca had sent her child, broke into a 
rebellion, instigated by the hidalgos who composed 
the household of the infant prince. The revolt con- 
tinued, notwithstanding the violence and cruelty of 
the Aragonese King, who is related to have killed 
with his hunting-spear a noble Galician while Urraca 
was in the act of interceding for his life. Baffled in 
his attempts to subdue the rebellion, the King retired 
to his own dominions. 

The period of five years that followed is occupied 
by the dissensions and intrigues of the principal 
characters of the age. The brutality of the Arago- 
nese King lost him almost immediately the love and 
the fidelity of Urraca, and the loyalty of his new sub- 
jects. Queen Urraca, possessing the inconstancy and 
capriciousness of her sex and her age, possessed also 



16 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

the ambition and disloyalty which were characteris- 
tic of most of the energetic sovereigns of the time. 
Her patent amours with a Castilian nobleman were 
probably the cause of the King's insulting her with a 
blow before the assembled Court, and imprisoning 
her at Castellar. The quarrel was appeased for the 
time by the nobles, but the Queen's treacherous 
nature, and her desire for further vengeance upon 
her husband, led her to send a message to the 
guardians of her child, still in Galicia, and to stir up 
a fresh revolt in that province. 

Count Henry of Portugal had long before entered 
into a secret alliance with the King of Aragon against 
Urraca ; but at the invitation of the infuriated Queen 
he readily abandoned the husband, to ally himself to 
the wife's interest, in the prospect of better furthering 
his own ; but the shrewd and cautious Count of 
Portugal had forgotten to allow for the caprice and 
for the envy of a woman. The growing strength of 
Count Henry's position in Portugal began probably 
to alarm her ambition, and the chronicler tells us 
that Urraca's jealousy was aroused by hearing her 
sister Tareja, Henry's wife, spoken of by her own 
subjects as Queen. 1 She reconciled herself suddenly 
with her husband, to the discomfiture of her new 
ally ; but by this time friends and foes had probably 
got to perceive the unstableness of her character. 
She was dangerous to plot with or against ; and this 
is, no doubt, one cause of the uneventfulness of her 

1 ' La mujer del conde era ya llamada de las suyas reyna lo 
qnal oyendo la reyna mal le sabia.' — Chronicle of Saliagun. 



THE RISE OF PORTUGAL. 17 

reign and the unfruitfulness of her long series of 
perfidies and intrigues. 

These various plots and counterplots were inter- 
rupted by the death of Count Henry of Portugal in 
1114. Tareja was left a widow with an infant and 
only son. This child was Alfonso Henriquez, des- 
tined to become the first and most famous of a line 
of famous sovereigns and conquerors. 

Tareja, the bastard daughter of the Castilian King, 
was probably at the time of her husband's death not 
much more than thirty years of age. The chroniclers, 
one and all, describe her as possessed of singular beauty 
and attractiveness, and as having a character marked 
by astuteness and energy. As a ruler she was am- 
bitious but over-cautious, and, like her half-sister 
Urraca, more inclined to win her way by intrigue 
than by boldness ; and she never, during her long 
reign, willingly committed her fortunes to the chances 
of war. 

I pass over briefly the years occupied by the reign 
of Urraca, Queen or Eegent of Leon and Castile. The 
King of Aragon was engaged during all this time 
with Saracenic warfare to the east and south, and 
only occasionally thought fit to invade his now 
divorced wife's kingdom. Tareja had promoted her 
lover, Fernando Peres, to a position in the state 
almost as high as that which had been occupied by 
her husband, the Count of Portugal. She slightly 
extended her possessions to the north, into Galicia, 
and thereby gave her sister and suzerain a pretext 
for invading her territory. 

c 



18 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

In the short campaign which ensued, in the cir- 
cumstances which led to it, and the events which 
followed, a new actor, Gelmires, Bishop of Santiago de 
Compostella in Galicia> played a most important part. 
This wily> ambitious, and turbulent churchman, the 
prime mover in the affairs of Leon and Portugal 
during several years, whose vanity seems to have been 
as conspicuous as his other ill qualities, has left, in 
the well-known ' Historia Compostellana,' drawn up 
at his command and for his own glorification, almost 
the only, and far the best, contemporary record of 
this period which we possess. In this chronicle the 
naive immorality of the times is curiously evidenced 
by the manner in which the unscrupulous disloyalty 
and double-dealing of its hero are set down by the 
annalist as proofs of his patron's dexterity and 
policy. 

Gelmires procured war - galleys from Genoa, 
manned them with hardy Galician boatmen, and 
harassed the Saracens of the south coast with a kind 
of naval raid from which the Christians had them- 
selves long been sufferers at the hands of the Moslems. 
He made his influence strongly felt throughout the 
whole north-west of Spain. The shrine of St. James 
of Compostella, then, and perhaps still, the most 
famous in Christendom, annually attracted crowds of 
pilgrims of every degree, and was the source of a 
large revenue to the Compostellan See. Their protec- 
tion against Moorish attack led, fifty years afterwards, 
to the institution of the famous Militant Order of 
Compost ell an Knights, and the service was at this 



THE RISE OF PORTUGAL, 19 

time performed by a body of armed men under the 
orders of the Bishop. Gelmires increased the number 
and improved the discipline of these troops till they 
attained to the numbers and organisation of an army. 
Many of the noblest Galician knights enrolled them- 
selves under his banners ; and when Urraca proposed 
to invade her sister's territories, she invoked, rather 
than commanded, the aid of this powerful prelate, 
her nominal subject. 

The chronicle tells us that iie was divided in his 
mind on the subject. He had already fomented civil 
war in Urraca's Galician provinces, favouring the now 
strong party which rallied round her son, the Infante 
Alonso Baimundes, and siding with Tareja. Urraca, 
however, was now in Galicia with an army. He 
feared to provoke her too far. Urraca had craftily 
encouraged the citizens of Compostella in their re- 
sistance to the Bishop ; they had already formed 
themselves into a guild or Hermandacl, one of those 
burghers' leagues which afterwards spread through 
Spain, and whose influence has lasted to this clay. 
Gelmires was forced to side with Queen Urraca. He 
encouraged her to invade Portugal, not sorry pro- 
bably to see the Leonese arms and the ambition of 
Urraca's adventurous barons diverted from Galicia 
and from his see. 

Urraca invaded Portugal, and Gelmires — this 
6 episcopal Mephistopheles,' as he is angrily called 
by a sedate Portuguese historian — joined, with little 
pressing from the Queen, an expedition against his 
former ally. The armies of the rival sister Queens 

c 2 



20 POKTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

met on the banks of the Minlio, near Tuy: Tareja 
was worsted ; her troops were routed, and she her- 
self, flying for her life, took refuge in the Castle of Lan- 
hoso. Urraca besieged the castle, and took her sister 
prisoner ; but this capricious, and— if we may judge 
her to be so from one or two incidental allusions 
by the chroniclers— this somewhat tender-hearted 
sovereign, did not choose to push her advantage as 
far as the scant humanity of the times might have 
allowed. Tareja and Urraca negotiated a treaty of 
peace, by which Tareja was left in little worse a 
position than before the campaign ; and Urraca, 
thinking the moment propitious for an attempt to 
check the ambition of Grelmires, her secret enemy 
and professed ally, suddenly threw the Bishop into 
prison. But she had not calculated upon all the 
power of the ecclesiastic. Her own son, the Infante, 
had come strongly under the Bishop's influence, and 
he shrewdly guessed that his interests had more in 
common with those of Gelmires than with those of 
an ambitious Queen-mother. The Infante drew off 
his troops ; the principal nobles joined him ; and in 
less than a week Galicia was in revolt, and Urraca 
was compelled to release the prelate. 

In the year 1126 died Queen Urraca, and the 
immediate consequence was that the whole of the 
powerful chivalry of Leon and Castile, divided till 
now in their allegiance between mother and son, went 
over in a body to the party of the young King. 
From this time forward lie was the most powerful 
Christian monarch of Spain. In Portugal, affairs 



THE RISE OF PORTUGAL. 21 

were unsettled. The Infanta Tareja had aroused the 
jealousy of the Portuguese by the favour shown to 
her lover, Fernando Peres, 1 and his Galician relations 
and friends. The country was ill governed, and the 
weakness of a ruler in statesmanship and war meant, 
in those times, danger of disastrous invasion from 
every powerful neighbour. Tareja was imprudent 
enough to refuse her allegiance to the new King of 
Leon. A destructive invasion of her territories was 
the immediate consequence, and she was compelled 
to admit his rightful suzerainty over the Province of 
Portugal. She had jealously kept her son apart 
from any share in the government, but the heir to 
the throne began to attract the attention of the 
dissatisfied nobles. 

The time has now arrived to say something of 
Prince AfFonso Henriquez. It is, unfortunately, the 
common way of early annalists and chroniclers to 
touch very lightly on the personal traits of the 
characters in their narrative, which to inquirers of a 
later age are of paramount interest and importance ; 
and the young Prince of Portugal fares little better 

1 Some Portuguese writers have contended warmly for the 
legitimacy of the connection between Fernando and Tareja. He 
was certainly, however, not her husband. There is no contem- 
porary mention of a marriage. She indeed calls herself in one 
charter-grant, a Galician one, ' Comitis Henrici quondam uxor 
nunc vero comitis Fernandi,' but this proves nothing but her 
wish for good fame. In no contemporary Portuguese charter 
does she so designate herself. The Historia C ompostellana 
distinctly says : — * Ego qui relicta sua legitima uxore cum matre 
ipsius infantis Regina Tarasia tunc adulterabatur.' This would 
seem to be quite conclusive. 



22 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

than the many figures of sovereigns, warriors, and 
churchmen which fill their scanty historical can- 
vases ; but AfTonso Henriquez made too deep a 
mark not to have left some trace of his individuality 
even in the dry narratives of the chroniclers, and we 
can gather a trait here and there wherewith to make 
up a piecework portrait which shall even now possess 
some lifelike features. 

At the time of his aunt Urraca's death, the prince 
was seventeen years old. Even at this early age he 
had taken part in the annual border fighting with 
Spaniards on the north and east, and with Saracens in 
the south. The perilous state of the country, and 
perhaps his own ambition, had led to his receiving 
the order of knighthood at the unusually early age 
of fourteen. Three years of incessant adventure 
and peril had developed the character and shown the 
high qualities of the Infante. He was already a 
captain whom his men could follow into action with 
enthusiasm, and in whose good judgment, and in the 
very graces of his manner and person, they could 
discern the rare qualities of a leader of men. Writ- 
ing of him at this period, a nearly contemporary chro- 
nicler tells us that the prince was a skilful and valiant 
knight, accomplished and persuasive in speech, most 
politic in his enterprises, of a high genius, noble in 
bodily proportions, and of a very comely presence. 
At a somewhat later date, when he had already 
redeemed the high promise of his youth, another 
monkish writer of the period somewhat reproaches 
him with his ardent temperament and love of adven- 



THE KISE OF PORTUGAL. 23 

hire. The youth, he tells us, though already well 
skilled in the art of ruling, is yet over-fond of fame, 
and is used to be carried away, like an over-light 
arrow, by every breath of heaven. 1 This mobile and 
ambitious temperament and this restless energy, little 
as they might recommend themselves in the eyes of a 
monk, were yet the very qualities to save a country 
in such a critical emergency as Portugal was now 
undergoing. Never till now had the province been 
so threatened with danger from without and within. 

The differences between Tareja and the nobles 
under the Infante quickly resolved themselves into 
war, and a battle was fought on the field of San 
Mamede, near Guimaraens, the then capital of Portu- 
gal. Tareja and her lover were routed and expelled 
from the kingdom, and a single day's battle placed 
the rule in the hands of Affonso Henriquez. Two 
years after this, Tareja died in exile. 

Affonso Henriquez owed an inherited allegiance 
to his cousin, the King of Leon, and it has been 
supposed to have been his desire to shake off this tie 
which induced him to invade his cousin's Galician 
provinces in the following spring; but it was pro- 
bably nothing but the fire and imprudence of youth 
which led him to this rash enterprise. The King of 
Leon, elsewhere engaged in warfare, deputed to 
Archbishop Gelmires the opposing of the Portuguese 
raid, but the cautious churchman held back. He was, 

1 ' Qui juvenis etsi regendi imperii bene sciolus tamen aniore 
laudis ardenter plenus ad quoscunque aurse flatus ut arundo fragilis 
ferebatur.' Ancient document quoted by Branda. 



24 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

or more probably he feigned to be, ill, and disobeyed 
the order ; and Affonso Henriquez carried fire and 
sword through Galicia unresisted. In the following 
year he again invaded Galicia, was repulsed by his 
old enemy, Count Fernando Peres, on the frontier, 
renewed the attack, and defeated the Galicians. On 
this occasion Affonso Henriquez built a castle at 
Celmes, in that province, provisioned and garrisoned 
it. From this Galician raid, or from a similar and 
previous one, he was recalled into Portugal by the 
growing power of Bermudo, a brother of Count 
Fernando. This nobleman, rising to influence during 
his brother's ascendency, had fortified himself in the 
Castle of Seia, near the Spanish frontier, among the 
fastnesses of the great Estrella range of mountains, 
the wildest and most inaccessible in the whole west- 
ern Peninsula. Here, surrounded by a race of 
hardy and warlike mountaineers, he thought it safe 
to defy the power of the Portuguese prince. Affonso 
Henriquez sought him out in the recesses of the 
mountains, besieged and took Seia by a coup de main 
and expelled Bermudo from Portugal. In the mean- 
time the young prince had himself roused the appre- 
hensions or the indignation of the King of Leon, who, 
with a numerous army, marched rapidly towards 
Galicia, and laid siege to Celmes in the absence of 
the Portuguese prince. In a few days, and after serious 
loss to its garrison, Celmes fell into the hands of the 
Leonese King. 

It will be well to pause here for an instant, to 
consider the precarious position of the young prince 



THE EISE OF PORTUGAL. 25 

and of his people. At this time the Leonese and 
Castilian nation was growing yearly in extent and 
power. Under a warlike leader they had carried 
their victories beyond the Ebro in the west, and the 
supremacy of the King of Leon had been acknow- 
ledged by the Navarrese and by the Court of Barce- 
lona, and even in the lands beyond the Pyrenees. 
His great rival the King of Aragon, El Lidador, was 
now dead ; his successor had hastened to give in his 
submission to King Alonso Eaimnndes, and with the 
exception of the one small quasi-independent province 
of Portugal, there was in all Christian Spain no one to 
dispute the ascendency of the Leonese. Their King's 
dominion was as wide as that of Fernando the Great, 
and he now assumed without opposition the title of 
Emperor. 

With such powerful and aggressive neighbours 
on the eastern and northern frontier of Portugal, an 
enemy lay over the southern border, more terrible to 
the Portuguese even than the Christian chivalry of 
Spain, for they were more implacable, as being enemies 
of their faith as well as of their race ; more numerous, 
for they had increased and multiplied exceedingly in 
the great plain of southern Portugal, rich in corn- 
lands and olive-groves ; and they could draw to their 
standards, on the emergency of battle, huge armies 
of disciplined men from the adjacent Andalusian 
provinces, and even from Morocco itself. Hemmed 
in, between Spaniards on the one side and Saracens 
on the other, the country ruled over by AfFonso 
Henriquez was in extent a mere province, a large 



26 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

part of whose surface was occupied by heath and 
wood and mountain. The Portugal of AfFonso Hen- 
riquez comprised only the three northern provinces 
out of the six into which modern Portugal is divided. 
A broad frontier band of hill and forest, untenanted 
by man and wasted by the annual passage of Moorish 
and Christian raiding parties, separated the two races. 
This desolated band of country occupied the northern 
portion of what is now the province of Portuguese 
Estremadura, and it stretched from the shores of the 
Atlantic to where the impassable highlands of the 
Estrella continued the border wilderness in a north- 
easterly direction till it reached the Spanish mountain 
ranges. 

At Soure, in this desert, a few miles south of 
Coimbra, the Knights Templars had adventurously 
built themselves a fortress ; but this outpost of the 
Christians was not enough to check the Saracen 
invasions. A broad path lay open to them in the 
easier plain country between Soure and the sea- 
board ; and while the Christian border was thus ill 
defended, the Saracens held fortified positions of 
great strength on their side of the frontier desert. 
One strong fortress lay secure from attack in 
the steep granite range of Cintra, close to the sea. 
Lisbon, already a populous city, and surrounded with 
fortifications built with all the artifice of Moorish 
architecture, was another defensive position ; and 
the city of Santarem, a few leagues to the north of 
Lisbon, was a third stronghold, the nearest and most 
tli reatei ling to Christian territory. 



THE RISE OF PORTUGAL. 27 

To guard the easy approacli to his dominions, the 
Portuguese ruler chose as the site of a new fortress 
the tall hill of Leiria (due south of Soure), which 
rises from what is comparatively a plain country, 
lying between Soure and the sea. Here he built a 
castle, garrisoned it with a picked garrison, and left it 
in charge of the most renowned among his captains, 
Paio Gutteres. 

While the Governor of Leiria was employed in 
harrying the unbelievers with raids from this fortress, 
the Prince himself had again invaded Galicia, and 
in the well-contested battle of Cerneja had utterly 
routed the troops of Leon ; but in the very moment 
of victory he was recalled by the news of disaster on 
the southern frontier. The Saracens, harassed and 
irritated by the vexatious incursions of the governor 
of Leiria, had besieged that fortress ; and the news 
that now reached the Portuguese ruler was that of 
the fall of Leiria and the slaughter of its garrison. 
Intelligence also came to him that the Emperor was 
advancing by forced marches from Zamora, in Leon, 
gathering together an overwhelmingly numerous army, 
and bent on revenging the defeat of his people at 
Cerneja. 

It was a critical moment, and the course of affairs 
seemed to be inevitably hastening to a catastrophe 
fatal to the hopes of Portuguese independence ; but 
this was not to be, and events in a distant and foreign 
country had long been preparing the way for a sud- 
den and unlooked-for turn in the affairs of Portugal. 

It is quite necessary to glance at these events. In 



28 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

Mahometan Spain, the warlike sect of the Almoravides, 
invited into Spain some fifty years before to stem 
the tide of Christian conquest, had done so most 
effectually (as we have already seen) at the great 
battle of Zalaca, fatal to the chivalry of Leon. After 
this, the Almoravides, turning their arms against 
their own allies, had overcome the Moorish rulers of 
Spain one after another, and established their supre- 
macy over the whole Moslem Peninsula ; but now 
the state of affairs was again changed. Half a cen- 
tury of power had lessened the first austerity of the 
Almoravides, and weakened their influence, both 
in Morocco and in the Peninsular provinces. There 
was abundant room for social, and for political, and 
for religious reform ; and such reform came about in 
the sudden and subversive manner which is character- 
istic of Oriental life. 

The son of a servant in a mosque, a Berber of 
the Atlas mountains, travelling to ^Cordova and after- 
wards to Bagdad, had acquired at these famous 
seats of Arabian letters the consideration which was 
in those days always conceded to superior learning. 
Eeturning to Morocco, he denounced fiercely the 
prevalent religious laxity, and the vices of people 
and rulers. Plying from the persecution which he 
met with, to the mountains, he preached a reformed 
Unitarianism, attracted a huge following of armed 
men, became a political power, and the Almohades', 
or Unitarian soldiers, formidable with a puritan 
sternness of religious zeal, threatened the security of 
the Almoravidian power in Morocco. 



THE RISE OF PORTUGAL. 29 

An emergency so sudden forced the Moors of Spain 
to prompt action. A large army was drained from all 
the provinces of the Peninsula, even those touching 
on the unquiet frontiers of the Christians. Such 
an opportunity for the Christian powers had never 
before occurred. The impending campaign between 
Affonso Henriquez and his suzerain was suspended 
by mutual consent. A peace was hastily arranged at 
Tuy, in the year 1137, and both rulers prepared to 
betake themselves to the Saracen frontiers of their 
dominions. Thus was the storm which threatened 
to overwhelm Portugal for the time averted. 

By the summer of the year 1139 the Prince of 
Portugal had begun his inarch southward, gathering 
to his standards, at every farm and homestead within 
reach of his line of march, the horse and foot soldiers 
whose tenure of crown land obliged them to render 
warlike service to their prince. Instead of passing 
through the frontier wilderness of Estremadura, the 
usual path of raiders from either side, the Prince, 
turning to the east, struck the Tagus in its upper 
waters, and found himself at once in a land where 
no Christian foot had stood for centuries 1 — the 
alluvial plain of Alemtejo, the richest land in 
Portugal — then the garden of the Moorish territories. 
The rough Portuguese spoiled the land and advanced 

1 Excapt, of course, the Mosarabes. Portuguese by race and 
Christian by religion, the Mosarabes conformed in dress, in 
manners, and in culture to the dominant race, lived among them, 
and contributed to the wealth and prosperity of the Moorish 
colonies of the Peninsula. 



30 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW, 

rapidly into the very heart of the Saracen territory, 
On the plain of Ourique, to the north of the populous 
city of Silves, a large Saracen army, drawn from all 
parts, prepared to give battle to the invaders. 




OLD HOUSE IN OPORTO. PERTOD OF KINO AFEONRO HENRIQUEZ. 



31 



CHAPTER II. 

THE FIRST KING OF PORTUGAL. 

The warfare between Portuguese and Saracen had 
hitherto been a warfare of sieges, of forays, of sur- 
prises and ambuscades^ of skirmishes at river-fords, 
or irregular fighting in the defiles of mountains or in 
the fastnesses of forests. The Christian Portuguese 
had never yet dared to meet their enemies in the 
open field. It must be remembered that the Christian 
remnant who had preserved their independence in 
the hills of the north were, in almost every respect, 
a people inferior to their enemies in all the arts of 
peace and war ; inferior in numbers, inferior in 
organization, vastly inferior in civilization and social 
culture, and — what in such times was of chief im- 
portance to their very existence — in discipline, in 
strategy, and the mere practice of warfare. Against 
the Gothic pike and the short sword of the Christians, 
hardly improved from Eoman times, the slender lance 
of the Saracens in the hands of their practised cavalry 
was what the rifle of the European soldier is when 
opposed to the assegai of the African savage or the 
rude matchlock of the Asiatic. Not till the Christian 
had borrowed the Arabian peaked saddle and the 



32 TORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

powerful curb-bit used by his enemies, not till he 
had learnt something of the skilful horsemanship of 
the Saracen, could lie acquire an efficient use of the 
lance — that best of all cavalry weapons — and make 
any stand at all in the open field against his Moslem 
enemy. 

In the long period before the faith feud between 
the two races had turned to the religious enthusiasm 
and animosity which made the Crusades a possibility, 
many adventurous Christian knights took service, as 
we have already seen, with the Saracens, and fought 
without compunction against men of their own faith 
and country. It was through such men that the arts 
of war, and some social culture, and some of the re- 
finements of military intercourse were borrowed by 
the Christians from a high-couraged and a courteous 
people, and grew at once into that spirit of Christian 
chivalry, whose influence for good, if it has been 
somewhat overrated, was certainly in no country and 
at no time so conspicuous as in the Peninsula and in 
this very generation. 

Now, for the first time in the history of the great 
racial struggle on Portuguese soil, the ascendency of 
the two peoples was to be set on the issue of a 
pitched battle on a field where, if tradition is to be 
trusted for the exact site, neither side could derive 
any material advantage from superiority of position. 

Alfonso Henriquez was completely victorious. 
With this short sentence we have exhausted almost 
all that the contemporary chroniclers have told us. 
One curious circumstance, indeed, they relate ; 



THE FIRST KING OF PORTUGAL, 33 

namely, that a large number of women fought on the 
side of the Almoravides, and though such a practice 
was in accordance with the occasional usages of this 
warlike sect, it testifies plainly enough to the fact that 
the exodus of fighting men had been great enough to 
cause them to resort to an expedient which can never 
fail to be repugnant to human nature. 1 

A number of legends, some religious, some 
patriotic, have clustered round the bare fact of the 
victory of Ourique ; but the majority of these myths 
can be traced to their origin in the fourteenth 
century, a period in the middle ages the most fruit- 
ful of legend and pseudo-tradition. The least in- 
credible of these legends, one to the effect that on 
the victorious field of Ourique AfFonso Henriquez 
assumed for the first time the crown of Portugal, is 
almost certainly mythical. It is not corroborated by 
charters granted at a later date, and it is not alluded 
to by any chronicler of the period. 

Notwithstanding the importance attached by the 
Portuguese themselves to the battle of Ourique, it 
was not a decisive battle in the accepted sense of that 
word, and it led to no immediate occupation of hostile 
territory. It was nothing but one of the annual 
raiding expeditions carried out on a larger scale, and 

1 ' Era m.clxxvii. (that is, the so-called Spanish era = a.d. 
1139). Julio mense die D. Jacobi apostoli fuit victoria Alfonsi 
regis de Esmar rege Saracenorum et innumerabili prope exercitu 
in loco qui dicitur Aulic tunc cor terrae Saracenorum quo per- 
rexit rex Alfonsus. Fceminse Saracense in hoc prselio amazoneo ritu 
ac modo pugnarunt et occisse tales deprehensse.' — Brevis Hist. 
Gothorum. 



34 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW, 

brought, by a combination of fortune, and of conduct 
and courage in its leader, to a larger* and more suc- 
cessful issue than usual. It was, indeed, a victory 
important in this respect, that it immediately con- 
ferred a wide military prestige on the numerically 
very insignificant people who were now struggling 
for independence, and of this they were to reap the 
benefit before the year was ended. 

In the same year Affonso Henrique^, for reasons 
which are not very clear, broke the peace of Tuy, 
and began a new Galician invasion. The campaign 
was in the beginning indecisive, and in a skirmish the 
prince himself was severely wounded, and for a time 
disabled, by a lance-thrust inflicted by a Galician foot 
soldier. The Emperor, though he was at the moment 
engaged in war with Navarre, hurried with a Leonese 
army to the defence of his Galician province, and came 
up with the invading Portuguese in the wild hill- 
country in the extreme north of Portugal ; and here 
occurred one of those picturesque scenes charac- 
teristic of the age, and of the softening effect of the 
spirit of chivalry and- the influence of the Church. 

The two armies were encamped on acclivities 
rising on either side from the valley of the little river 
Vez. A preliminary skirmish had already taken 
place, and one of the Emperor's commanders, push- 
ing forward from the main army, had been en- 
countered and worsted by the Infante himself. The 
shock of a great battle was imminent, whose issue 
could not but have been decisive of events in 
Christian Spain. In relating what follows, it is fair 



THE FIRST KING OF PORTUGAL. 35 

to suppose, taking the accounts of Spanish and 
Portuguese chroniclers as our guide, that the 
Emperor hesitated before engaging in an encounter, 
whose results might be so serious, with an enemy 
numerically, certainly, greatly inferior, but of proved 
valour, fresh from the field of great exploits, and 
doubly strong in being commanded by so redoubt- 
able a leader as the young Prince of Portugal. It 
is related that the Emperor of Leon, on the very 
eve of this battle, sent heralds into the camp of the 
enemy, and, through the intervention of the Portu- 
guese Archbishop of Braga, obtained the consent of 
the Infante to an armistice. Thus again was an 
honourable termination put to what promised to be 
a most bloody campaign ; but such a concourse 
of gallant knights could not part, according to the 
laws of chivalry, without the performance of some 
courteous and knightly feats of arms. 

The long and narrow valley, known as Yaldevez, 
which lay between the Portuguese and Spanish 
armies, broadens at one place into a level space, from 
which the surrounding hills, occupied by the rival 
armies, rise like the sides of an ancient amphitheatre. 
Into this natural arena, when peace was declared, rode 
the champion knights from either side, and fought 
for the honour of their native lands. The victory in 
this tournay, say the Portuguese chroniclers, was 
with their side, and several Leonese cavaliers were 
worsted and taken prisoners, in accordance with the 
usages of public duels, and one knight lost his life. 
The Spanish annalists state, on the other hand, that 

D 2 



36 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

prisoners were taken on both sides. The spot was 
long afterwards known as Jogo do Bufurdio, the place 
of the tournament ; and it is worth observing that the 
almost bloodless tournay of Yaldevez came in time to 
be magnified into a great Portuguese victory, and the 
very name of its site to be transformed, with curious 
exaggeration, into Veiga da Mata?iqa, the field of 
slaughter. 1 

So little really decisive had been the famous battle 
of Ourique, that the Saracens, taking advantage of 
the presence of the Portuguese army in the north, 
entered the kingdom, and marched northward as far 
as the important town of Trancoso, which lies within 
a few leagues to the south of the I)ouro. News of 
the capture of Trancoso reached the Infante at 
Valdevez, and he hastened to its rescue. In two 
serious engagements the Saracens Were overborne, 
and retreated to the south. 

The constant good fortune of the King in his 
military enterprises had, by this time, attracted the 
attention of Europe to the small country over which 
lie ruled. He was recognised at Eome as a valiant 
and faithful soldier of the Church. In the great 
strife between Cross and Crescent, service as useful 
to the cause of Christianity could be rendered in the 
Peninsula as in the Holy Land or Iconium; and Spanish 
and Portuguese knights were expressly dispensed from 

1 ' The scene of the engagement was the country between 
Arcos and Santo Andre de Guilhadeges. The King of Leon was 
defeated with great slaughter, and the place in consequence re- 
ceived the name of Veiga da Matanca.' — Murray's Handbook : 
third edition, carefully revised. 



THE FIRST KING OF POETUGAL. 37 

any obligation of crossing the seas in order to seek 
for Moslem enemies. Affonso Henriquez now began 
to use bis best efforts to free himself from any re- 
maining allegiance to the Emperor. He perceived 
the importance of obtaining from the Pope some re- 
cognition of his independence, and he corresponded 
with the Holy See with this object. The Pope did 
not hesitate to contribute to the independence of so 
approved a champion of Christianity, and in the year 
1144, Pope Lucius II. addressed him a letter in which 
his claims to sovereign powers are recognised, and 
even the title of King is almost actually conferred. 
Prom this period, and, to take the evidence of charters, 
shortly before it, Affonso Henriquez had assumed the 
title of an absolute sovereign, and we may, in future, 
style him King of Portugal. 

Thus painfully, and by slow degrees, was this 
small semi-Gothic people- — a mere handful of men 
among the surrounding hostile Christian and Moslem 
populations — educating itself to the knowledge of 
liberty and independence. In the veins of prince 
and people ran, with their half-northern blood, some 
germs of freedom, some conception of a solidarity 
between ruled and rulers, of respect for law and 
authority mingled with jealousy of encroachment 
upon public rights, something of antagonism to 
personal government and tyranny ; and the germs of 
these noble ideas were now acquiring a goodly growth 
amid the successes of the nation under a great and 
congenial leader. 

It is far more interesting to the student of a 



38 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

people's progress to extract the story of the gradual 
emerging of the Portuguese into national life from 
the dry and scanty records of the time, than to read 
of the marvels of military prowess and the numerous 
instances of direct Divine intervention with which the 
patriotism and the piety of later historians have sur- 
rounded the rise of their country into the rank of 
nations. Nevertheless, even these exaggerations and 
foolish legends and allegations of the supernatural 
are interesting enough in themselves as an indirect 
testimony to the greatness of the work then done by 
prince and people. 

In the meantime, the struggle between the 
Almoravides and the new sect of Almohades had ex- 
tended to the Peninsula. Ibn Kasi, an Almoravidian 
renegade, an energetic, unscrupulous and ambitious 
man, had placed himself at the head of an Almo- 
hadian insurrection in the great Saracen province of 
Gharb ; and he was appointed Almohadian Wali or 
governor of the important fortress of Mertola in that 
province. The contest between Almoravidians and 
Almohades in Gharb was long, bloody, and for a time 
indecisive, and Ibn Kasi bethought him of obtaining 
the alliance of the now formidable Affonso Henri quez. 
The Almoravides, the ancient enemies of the Portu- 
guese ruler, issuing from their stronghold at San- 
tarem, had recently again defeated the Portuguese 
Templars of Soure, and King Alfonso Henri quez 
gladly availed himself of this opportunity to make 
reprisals. 



THE FIRST KING OF PORTUGAL. 39 

He joined his forces to those of Ibn Kasi, but the 
Saracen and his Christian ally were ill mated. It is 
clear that Affonso Henriquez did not desire, and 
would not consent to lend his help to any operations 
likely to establish, the permanent ascendency of either 
party among the enemies of his faith and country. 
He wanted warlike occupation for his troops, and 
the rich plunder of the populous territory of the 
Saracens. The astute Ibn Kasi found in the King a 
sagacity greater and a will far stronger than his 
own. In the presence of Affonso Henriquez, to use 
the picturesque phrase of an Arab chronicler, Ibn 
Kasi was like a slave before his lord, hardly daring 
to lift his eyes from the ground. With so intractable 
and so dangerous an ally, the Saracen hastened to 
make any terms, and Affonso Henriquez and his army 
in time took their way back into Portugal, laden with 
valuable spoil in slaves, in arms, in armour, and in 
war-horses of the Arab and African races. 

The continued possession by his enemies of the 
great stronghold of Santarem, a point d'appui for 
yearly aggression, was, we are told, an unceasing 
vexation to the soul of the Portuguese king. This 
city and citadel lay, and still he, on the north bank 
of the Tagus, in the centre of a rich plain, which 
extended wedge-like into the heart of the desert 
border-land of Estremadura. It therefore was the 
Saracen position which lay nearest and was most 
threatening to the Christians. Santarem was believed 
to be impregnable ; an opinion justified to this day in 
the eyes of those who have traced out the ruins of 



40 POKTUGAL : OLD AJMD NEW. 

its Moorish citadel on an eminence overlooking the 
Tagus, and surveyed the natural and artificial scarps 
"and counterscarps of the hill-sides along which it is 
built. 

Warfare in that age and country was, as we have 
already seen, to a great extent, an affair of sieges ; 
and, in so far as it was so, the advantage was 
altogether with the Saracens. In the art of building 
strong places, of taking them, and of resisting cap- 
ture, the Christian nations of Europe had inherited, 
and had not improved upon, the clumsy artillery (if 
we may use the word in its first sense) of the Romans ; 
and the Crusaders, in Asia Minor and Syria, found 
themselves as much inferior to the Saracens in this 
branch of the military art as did the Christians of 
Spain and Portugal. The defenders of Santarem, 
therefore, felt perfectly secure in a strong, watchful 
garrison ; in their lofty turrets, garnished with all the 
artifice of Arabian war science ; and securer still in 
the proved ignorance of their enemies. 

To take Santarem openly and in the light of day 
was clearly impossible ; but it was an age in which 
stratagem made an essential and honourable branch 
of the art of war, and in which branch of it the 
keener and more subtle wits of the Orientals were 
also greatly at an advantage. 

In the spring of the year 1147, King Alfonso 
Henriquez lay at Coimbra, his capital, when he 
schemed an attempt upon Santarem. He is said to 
have obtained exact information of the height and 
position of the walls and towers of Santarem, to have 



THE FIRST KING OF PORTUGAL. 41 

prepared scaling-ladders, and to have sketched out a 
plan of assault. In three night marches, his small 
army had passed the fifty or sixty miles of wild and 
deserted country that lay between Coimbra and 
Santarem, successfully eluding the observation of the 
Saracen outposts and watchers by the way : on the 
third, some hours before daylight, he was under the 
walls of the city. The ladders were set, the walls 
scaled, and the troops, following their King with the 
war-cry of Sanctiago e Rei Affonso ! overpowered 
the garrison, and the redoubtable stronghold of San- 
tarem was in the hands of the Christians. 1 

The capture of Santarem was of more importance 
to the Christian cause in Portugal than any event 
within the previous fifty years. Ii: extended Christian 
territory to the Tagus, made Moorish aggression 
more difficult, and the Christian invasion of Gharb 
easier than before. 

The King, however, now meditated an exploit far 
greater than this, and which, if accomplished, would 
carry the fame of the Portuguese nation to every 
Christian Court and camp in Europe. This was the 
capture of Lisbon itself. But although to take an 

1 The narrative in the text is probably very near the facts. 
The usually cautious Herculano tells the story in detail, closely 
following the account of this episode given in the Life of St. 
Theotomio, Prior of Santa Cruz, a contemporary and, according to 
the Cistercian monk, his biographer, an adviser of King Affonso 
Henriquez. The date of the Life is uncertain ; its queer latimty, its 
half-romantic style, and the narration of many very improbable 
circumstances, do not appear to the present writer, after a very pain- 
ful perusal of it, to be like the truth, or even like the pious fraud 
of a contemporary. 



42 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

outpost like Santarem by a sudden and unexpected v 
assault had been proved to be possible, there were 
circumstances connected with the defences of Lisbon 
which rendered its capture, with the resources of the 
King of Portugal, quite beyond the bounds of pos- 
sibility. 

Lisbon was at this time the richest and the most 
populous city of the Peninsula. Moorish accounts 
compute the number of its inhabitants at between 
four and five hundred thousand. Its magnificent sea 
approach had long made it the chief emporium of 
trade between Europe and northern Africa. The city 
lies on the northern bank of the Tagus, where the river 
broadens into a lake-like estuary : from the edge of 
the water rose the city, as it still rises, amphitheatre- 
wise upon hilly ground. On the northern slopes of 
these hills was situated the Kassba, or Moorish citadel, 
with its round turrets, its ditches, and its battlemented 
curtains. Strong lines of fortification extended from 
either side of the fortress to the river, and enclosed the 
whole city, except on the river side, where it was suffi- 
ciently protected by the Moorish fleets. The efforts of 
the Portuguese against so formidable an enceinte would 
certainly have proved futile, and it is not likely that 
even the enterprising King Affonso Henriquez would 
have made any attempt, but for a wholly unlooked- 
for occurrence. 

Two years before the capture of Santarem, the, 
first Crusade had ended in complete disaster to the 
Christian arms in Asia Minor, and levies were already 
gathering in France and in Germany for a fresh ex- 



THE FIRST KING OF PORTUGAL. 43 

pedition to the East. A large force of Frenchmen 
and Germans were at this time travelling overland to 
Palestine, along the route which had already been 
followed by a previous generation of Crusaders ; but 
the levies from England, North Germany, and the Low 
Countries, not unaccustomed to the sea, preferred, to 
the fatigues of a tedious journey afoot through 
Hungary and modern European Turkey, the long and 
dangerous voyage from the mouths of the Ehine, down 
the British Channel, across the Bay of Biscay and 
through the Pillars of Hercules into the Mediterranean. 
News of these sea-travelling Crusaders had probably 
reached the King of Portugal, through France, long 
before its slow and timid navigation had brought the 
fleet within sight of his shores ; and it is almost cer- 
tain that he had foreseen and planned the combina- 
tion which he subsequently put into practice. 

The German Crusaders under Arnulph of Areschot, 
and the Flemings under Christian of Gistell, had put 
in at Dartmouth, there to join the English contingent. 
These latter were commanded by four Constables, 
and the whole force assembled in the port of Dart- 
mouth numbered about 13,000 fighting men, of whom 
the greater number probably were Englishmen. 1 

It happened that among the English Crusaders 
was a scholar, no doubt a churchman of inferior 
rank, who subsequently drew up a lengthy account, 
in the form of a letter, of the voyage and of its 
various incidents, in a manner so graphic that it fur- 

1 ' Pars eorum maxima venerat ex Anglia.' — Henry of Hunt- 
ingdon. 



44 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

rushes us with by far the best and fullest description 
that has come down to the present time of the 
curious episode of the siege of Lisbon. 1 

The English portion of the fleet first made land 
on the coast of northern Spain, then, creeping round 
westward, they put in at Oporto to await the arrival 
of the Flemish and German contingent, from whom 
they had parted company in a gale. 

At Oporto, the Crusaders were met by the Bishop 
of that city, who had the King's commands to receive 
them courteously, and to invite them to proceed to 
Lisbon and to join the Portuguese troops in an attack 
upon that stronghold. After some discussion, and 
upon the arrival of the rest of the Crusaders, it was 
agreed by them to join their forces to those of the 
King, in a work kindred to that for which they had 
left their own country. The fleet accordingly set sail 
for the Tagus, while the King's troops marched thither 
by land. Much of the letter is taken up with ac- 
counts of the dissensions between the members of the 
various nationalities which composed the crusading 
armies, and the mode in which peace was kept 
among these unruly warriors by the King of the 
Portuguese. 

The powerful fleet of the Crusaders cut off the 

1 Under the title of Cruce Signati anglici Epist. de expugna- 
tione Ulisiponis, this document is well known to students of 
history. It is mentioned by Cooper (vol. i. page 166) with the 
title Expeditio /rancor um anglorum, etc., per Osbernum. The MS. 
exists, I believe, in the library of Corpus, Cambridge. It was 
printed in 1861 in the Monumenta Ilistorica of the Lisbon 
Academy, from which co£>y I quote. 



THE FIRST KING OF PORTUGAL. 45 

communications of the Lisbon garrison by water, and 
the troops, disembarking and joining with the Por- 
tuguese, were sufficient to encompass the whole city; 
but the Moorish garrison was a strong one, and the 
defences in good order. Continual sorties were made 
from the city, and in the fighting which took place, 
the advantage was as often on the side of the Saracens 
as of the besiegers. Finally the English troops suc- 
ceeded, after heavy loss, in penetrating the suburbs 
of the city, which, though lying outside the city wall, 
were tenanted by a large population. Here also 
were the grain stores of the inhabitants, and from 
this time the garrison suffered severely from famine. 

In the various arts of siege warfare, the Saracens 
had always the advantage. They were the more 
ingenious, and the more watchful, and the more 
active. A tower on wheels built by the English 
Crusaders was burnt ; another, constructed at great 
expense of time and trouble by the Germans, met the 
same fate ; mining works, prepared by the Flemings 
on a large scale, were countermined by the garrison 
and destroyed. The war engines of the Saracens 
were superior in size and power to those of the 
Christians, and the besiegers were assailed by over- 
powering showers of stones and darts whenever they 
advanced to the assault. 

Finally, however, a Pisan engineer devised a 
wooden tower on wheels, of unexampled proportions. 
Englishmen and Portuguese worked in company at 
its construction, and fifty English and fifty Portu- 
guese soldiers having manned this moving castle, and 



46 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

each man of the hundred having been supplied with 
a piece of the True Cross, it was rolled up to the city 
walls amid the breathless expectation of the besieging 
hosts. The Saracens, seeing the imminence of their 
danger, sallied forth in great numbers and attacked 
the approaching tower. The Pisan engineer, who 
directed the operation, was wounded and disabled by 
a stone hurled from a Moorish catapult. The tide, 
flowing unusually high, covered the sands on which 
the tower was moving, and cut off support from the 
besiegers ; but it came nearer and nearer, and finally 
reached to within a yard of the parapets, whose 
height it equalled. Then a drawbridge was thrown 
across, and the English and the Portuguese were pre- 
paring to enter the city, when the Saracens, seeing 
further resistance to be useless, surrendered. 1 The 
city capitulated, and was mercilessly sacked. The 
King lost no time in devising for the captured city a 
form of municipal government, which strongly testi- 
fies to his liberality, toleration, and wisdom, in an age 
when the narrow bigotry and ferocity of kings and 
rulers were usually as conspicuous as these qualities 
in their subjects. The Moslem population were 
treated by the Portuguese in a manner which was in 

1 This is a slight modification of the account of the English 
Crusader. According to his statement, his countrymen had the 
chief share in the capture of Lisbon. A Flemish relation, on the 
other hand, makes less of the English prowess, and takes credit for 
a successful assault by Flemings and Lorrainers. Herculano 
shrewdly remarks that had a detailed Portuguese narrative of the 
siege existed, his own countrymen would, no doubt, have received 
their full share of credit. 



THE FIRST KING OF rORTUGAL. 47 

singular contrast to the contemporary atrocities of 
the Crusaders in the East, for the Moors of Lisbon 
were neither put to the sword, nor compelled 
to change their religion, nor enslaved, nor even 
banished. They continued to reside in the city, and 
they enjoyed, under a charter granted by the King, 
considerable liberties and privileges. They retained 
in their own hands the election of a judge, and the 
taxation to which they were subjected does not appear 
to have been excessive. The King's administration of 
church affairs was equally liberal and judicious. He 
appointed many foreign ecclesiastics to the newly- 
created chief offices of the church ; among whom 
Gilbert, an Englishman, was the first Bishop of Lisbon. 

The King likewise turned his attention to the 
establishment of a navy, which his countrymen had 
never yet possessed. He favoured naval enterprise 
by conferring knightly rank and the privilege of 
citizenship on native and on foreign sailors, and he 
drew thereby Flemings, Englishmen, and Forth Ger- 
mans into the new commercial marine of Portugal. 
Thus encouraged by a wise protection and by impar- 
tial justice, soon after the capture of Lisbon and what 
might have been its commercial ruin, its trade 
acquired a sudden, and a great, and a permanent 
development. 

King AfTonso, however, could give but little of 
his time to the peaceful arts of government. The 
Moors still occupied the country and the strong 
places to the south of Lisbon. The trans-Talari 
province, most of which is now known as Alemtejo, 



48 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

is a vast plain, containing only in its extreme east a 
hilly region with valleys of great fertility. At the 
two most commanding points of this eastern upland 
district lay labor ah, now Evora, and Bajah, now called 
Beja, Moorish cities and strongholds, and both of them 
important places at all periods of Portuguese history. 
At the western extremity of the province, towards 
the Atlantic, the trans-Tagan district juts out into a 
broad promontory, terminating in Cape Espichel, 
and here again the country ceases to be a plain : the 
land rises into hills, and each one is crowned, as the 
Moorish custom was, with fortified places. Of these, 
Palmella, which dominates the entrance of the river 
Sado, had already surrendered to the Christians 
during the siege ; and Almada, a stronghold on the 
south bank of the Tagus, where sea and river meet, 
fell almost immediately afterwards into the hands of 
the King. Alcacer do Sal, a rich city, and an impor- 
tant place of arms, in the centre of this plain country, 
resisted the sudden attack made by the King in person, 
at the head of a handful of Chiistian knights, and the 
King received a severe wound ; but within a year it 
had again been attacked, and had fallen. There now 
only remained Evora and Beja in the east, and when 
these strongholds were captured by the Christians, 
the whole trans-Tagan plain country was at the mercy 
of King AfFonso Henri quez. 

In the meantime, he had been careful to apportion 
out the conquered land among the more worthy of 
his captains, and to endow the powerful Orders of 
militant and other monks, who had at all times either 



TH^ FIRST KING OF PORTUGAL. 49 

fought with him in the van of the Peninsular Crusade, 
or, in the case of the non-militant Orders, assisted in 
the colonisation of the land. One such endowment has 
survived almost to our own days — a monument of 
these rude times and the wisdom of the King's dis- 
positions. The broad strip of deserted frontier which 
has already been described as lying between Christian 
and Moorish territory, was now available for occupa- 
tion ; but the tenure of Portuguese power was still 
insecure, as was presently to be proved, and the dis- 
trict which had so long been a waste was not readily 
to be repeopled. In its centre, not far from the great 
Christian stronghold qf Leiria, the King now settled a 
monastery of Bernardine monks, at Alcobaca, which 
soon became the largest, and perhaps the richest and 
most important, of the many Cistercian monasteries 
which the zeal of St, Bernard was helping to spread 
over the face of western Europe ; and the industry 
and the example of the brothers of this austere Order 
soon converted the wilderness of western Estrema- 
dura into a well-tilled district, whose exceptionally 
high cultivation, conspicuous to this day in agri- 
cultural Portugal, may, I think, be traced to the 
early lessons of the monks of St. Bernard. 

Changes in Spanish and in Moorish affairs began, 
ten years after the capture of Lisbon, to threaten 
danger to Portugal. Alonso, the Emperor of Leon 
and Castile, dying in 1157, Leon passed into the 
hands of his son Fernando, and Castile into those of 
Sancho, the first-born, and the two brothers seem to 
have cast envious eyes upon the territories of King 

E 



50 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

Affonso Henriquez, and to have meditated some 
attempt upon Portugal ; but Sancho of Castile died 
before these plans could be carried out. He was 
succeeded by an infant son. Fernando, the new 
King of Leon, lost little time in invading his nephew's 
territories, and civil war began to rage over northern 
Spain. It was then that King Fernando sought and 
obtained in marriage Urraca of Portugal, the eldest 
daughter of King Affonso Henriquez, by Mafalda, his 
queen. The King of Leon and the Infanta Urraca, 
then a girl of eleven, were married in 1165, but this 
alliance did not prevent subsequent rivalry and 
disunion between Leon and Portugal. 

By this time a very powerful enemy was turning 
his attention in the direction of Portugal. The 
famous Moorish Emir, Abdu-1-mumen, successor to 
the founder of the reforming sect of the Almohades, 
had now conquered the whole of eastern Morocco, 
and prepared an expedition across the Straits of 
Gibraltar. The fame of Ibn Errik— the son of Henry 
— as the Saracens were accustomed to term their 
great Portuguese adversary, had reached his ears, and 
alarmed him for the future security of Saracen power 
in the Peninsula. 

He landed, in 1161, with a large army of veteran 
soldiers, disciplined men, used to victory, full of 
religious zeal, and in every way of far superior war- 
like aptitude to any Moorish troops whom the 
Portuguese had yet encountered. The Emir des- 
patched 18,000 picked horsemen of this army to 
Gharb, under a leader who offered battle to the King. 



THE FIRST KING OF PORTUGAL. 51 

The Portuguese were routed with a cruel loss to their 
armies, already reduced by a long series of campaigns. 
Thus was the long career of Portuguese victory 
checked in the moment of its culminating triumph : 
but the victory of the Moors, though complete, was 
by no means decisive. They retired with a rich 
booty, and the indefatigable King of the Portuguese 
recommenced his incursions into Moorish territory. 
He retook and permanently occupied Evora anclBeja, 
the Moorish strongholds of eastern Alemtejo, which 
in a previous campaign had been taken and aban- 
doned ; and probably it was at this time that he made 
his memorable expedition towards and across the 
river Guadiana — ,a river never yet forded by a 
Portuguese host — and captured Moura, Serpa, and 
Alconchel, hill forts on the natural frontier between 
modern Spain and Portugal, and penetrating into the 
very heart of the Moslem territory, took the important 
city of Truxillo by storm. 

It was this never-ending activity in daring exploits, 
and this reiteration of success against great odds, 
that filled his subjects with admiration and his 
enemies with terror and respect. Of the King's 
personal prowess, and of his sagacity in those sudden 
emergencies where sagacity is most apt to disappear, 
we have an impartial testimony in the record of a 
Moorish chronicler. 1 

; This enemy of God,' says the exasperated anna- 
list, ' would set about the taking of strong places in 
this fashion. Choosing a dark and stormy night, he 
1 Ibn-Sahibi-s-salat : quoted by Herculano. 
e 2 



52 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

would. sally forth with only a handful of picked men. 
Arrived before the castle he intended to attack, the 
King it was in person who would be the first to scale 
the walls. When he had reached the parapet, he 
would throw himself upon the first sentinel, and 
holding a dagger to his breast, compel him to answer 
the usual challenge of his fellows without arousing 
their suspicions. After this he would wait in the em- 
brasure of the battlements till his men had followed ; 
then suddenly the King would raise his war-cry of 
Sanctiago ! and the whole party would fall furiously, 
sword in hand, upon the garrison.' 

It was about the year 1165 that dissension, from 
some unrecorded cause, broke out between Alfonso 
Henri quez and his son-in-law, the King of Leon. 
Without inquiring into the circumstances or the his- 
tory of this quarrel, it is characteristic of the promp- 
titude of the King of Portugal, that on the breaking 
out of war he lost no time in sending an expedition 
into Castile, where the Leonese King had already 
provoked the hostility of the inhabitants, and he con- 
centrated his attack upon Ciudad Rodrigo, the very 
point which was looked upon by Wellington as the 
key of Avestern Spain, and of which King Alfonso 
clearly perceived the military importance. 

On this occasion the King, occupied on the Moorish 
borderland, did not accompany the army of the 
north ; and the Leonese troops, commanded by the 
warlike Fernando in person — one of the most able of 
the early Spanish princes — broke the Portuguese lines 
and completely routed them. The bad news was 



THE FIRST KING OF TORTUGAL. 53 

carried back, and Affonso Henriquez hastened from 
his southern frontier with a small body of veteran 
troops, rallied his people, and, with more than his ac- 
customed audacity and success, carried the war into 
the very midst of the territories of the victorious 
Spaniards. Having forced a great part of the impor- 
tant province of Galicia to submit to him, he came 
south, and laid siege to Badajos on the Guadiana — a 
Moorish city, owing some undefined vassalage to the 
King of Leon — desirous, no doubt, to add this strong 
city to the line of frontier posts he had already won. 
The Portuguese took the city, but the Moorish gar- 
rison escaped into the citadel, and before the King could 
reduce it, he found himself besieged and hard pressed 
by a large army of Leonese under King Fernando. 
The garrison made a sally, while the Leonese forced 
the walls, and the Portuguese were assailed in the 
streets of Badajos by their Moorish and their Leonese 
enemies. They were overborne. The streets of 
Moorish cities are narrow and tortuous, and, as is 
always the case in street fighting, the slaughter was 
great. The Portuguese were outnumbered, and were 
probably already beginning to give way, when the 
King, in the melee, was dashed by his horse against 
the jamb of a gateway. His thigh was broken, and he 
fell senseless to the ground. His followers, losing 
their leader, were wholly overmastered, and Affonso 
Henriquez found himself a prisoner in the hands of 
the Leonese King. 

Those who find an interest in tracing the conca- 
tenation of historical events from physical rather than 



54: PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

from moral causes, may entertain themselves with 
conjectures as to the possible alteration of all Penin- 
sular history had King Fernando chosen to exercise 
to the full his rights of victor over his royal captive. 
Fortunately, the King of Leon was a generous as well 
as an enlightened prince — generous and enlightened, 
according to contemporary record, beyond precedent 
or example in those times. 

It is not unlikely that in an age of chivalry the 
young Spanish King may have been moved to some 
sentiment of actual enthusiasm towards the man 
whose heroic exploits were already the theme of the 
wandering troubadour in every Christian Court in 
weste'rn Europe. It is even more probable that he 
feared also to hinder of his freedom the Christian 
champion who was in himself the strongest bulwark 
of the Church and of the independence of the Hispano- 
Gothic races, and this, too, at a juncture the most 
critical, when the Moslem power was day by day re- 
newing its ancient strength in the Peninsula. Be the 
reason what it may, King Fernando released his 
prisoner, requiring of him only the restitution of his 
recent Galieian conquests. 

A fresh cloud was now gathering on the 
Portuguese horizon. Yusuf had succeeded to Abdu- 
1-mumen as Emir of Morocco, and the new prince, 
after consolidating his own government, sent an army 
into the Peninsula to check the growing power o'f 
Alfonso Henriquez ; but the general, on reaching the 
Peninsula, learnt the news of the defeat of the greatest 
enemy of his race at Badajos. He withdrew his 



THE FIRST KING OF PORTUGAL. 55 

troops, contenting himself, for a time, with watching 
the Portuguese frontier, and with a desultory warfare 
of raids and forays. The reverse which King Affonso 
Henriquez had met with at Badajos, his tedious re- 
covery from his wound, his increasing age, and the 
presence of strong and disciplined forces of African 
Moors, were circumstances which were beginning to 
diminish the terror he had hitherto inspired in the 
eyes of the Moslems ; and it was these reasons, 
probably, which induced the Emir to order, and 
perhaps to accompany, a fresh expedition into the 
heart of Portugal. The danger was imminent, not to 
Portugal only but to Christian Spain, and King 
Fernando of Leon, unasked, marched his troops to the 
defence of the common cause of Christianity. Yusuf 
retreated from the combined Leonese and Portuguese 
armies, and the peril for the time passed away. 

The few following years- passed more quietly. 
The King, fatigued by the unceasing toils of a 
soldier's life, his energy diminished by age, his body 
enfeebled by many grievous wounds, felt himself to be 
no longer fit for war. He deputed to his son Sancho, 
who inherited no small portion of his father's warlike 
aptitude, the task of carrying on the usual yearly war 
of raids and forays across the Saracen frontier, while 
he devoted himself to the task of reforming the wild 
society which had grown up during a period of in- 
cessant warfare. He granted charters to cities and 
to communes, rectified boundaries, dispensed justice, 
and did all that a ruler can do to settle his country 
and to strengthen the reign of law and order. 



56 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

It was in 1179, in the sixty-ninth year of the 
King's life, that the storm, which had long been 
threatening, burst on the Christians of Portugal. 
The power of the Almohades was now at its zenith, 
under the great Emir Yusuf, and that prince deter- 
mined to make an effort with the whole of his dis- 
posable forces to restore the integrity of his Portu- 
guese province, to retake the many castles fallen into 
Christian hands, and more especially to reoccupy the 
great frontier fortress of Santarem, and Lisbon, the 
ancient centre of Moorish commerce and government. 
Yacub, his son, was accordingly despatched to 
Portugal, and Avar with the Christians was carried on 
with varying success for three years. 

In 1184, Yusuf himself invaded the Peninsula 
with an army more numerous, probably, and 
certainly better disciplined > than had crossed the 
Straits of Gibraltar since his namesake, the famous 
Almoravidian Emir, had brought over the troops 
which had routed the Christians in the decisive battle 
of Zalaca. Yusuf marched from Gibraltar, making 
towards Santarem, and was joined on the way 
through Andalusia by strong battalions of Almo- 
hadian soldiery. The Emir's troops crossed the 
Tagus, and settling down in countless multitudes in 
the rich plain which surrounds Santarem, encom- 
passed and beleaguered that place. 

Sancho, the Infante, commanded a powerful 
garrison within the enceinte of Santarem, and fought 
with at first some success against his numerous 
enemies; but lie was overwhelmed by numbers, and 



THE FIRST KING OF PORTUGAL. 57 

the disciplined Almohadian troops left none of the 
arts of siege untried to hasten the surrender • of the 
fortress. The besieged already counted the duration 
of their further resistance by hours. 

The newly acquired independence of the Portu- 
guese nation seemed to be at last hanging in the 
very balance, when, from the towers of Santarem, 
the hard-pressed garrison perceived a numerous 
troop of rapidly approaching cavalry. Presently 
they distinguished the pennons and banners of 
Christian knights, and as the troop came nearer, 
they recognised the well-known form of the old King 
himself, riding at the head of his knights. He had 
come by forced marches to the succour of his son 
from the extreme north of Portugal. The gates of 
the city were thrown open, the garrison sallied forth, 
and joining the King's men, they fell together upon 
the vast host of the Saracens. The besiegers, panic- 
struck at the sudden apparition of the terrible King 
of Portugal, the triumphant shouting of the garrison, 
and the sudden combined assault, were put to flight ; 
the Emir himself was slain, and his armies driven 
over the Tagus, and forced to a disastrous rout 
across the Moorish frontier ; and thus, by what 
seemed a real miracle in contemporary eyes, was 
Portugal freed in a day from the greatest peril 
with which it had ever been threatened. 1 

1 Herculano, with, as it seems to me, an excess of his habitual 
caution, inclines to follow the scanty Arabic Chronicles in his 
account of the King's victory at Santarem. It is perhaps hardly 
necessary to mention a fact which forces itself painfully upon the 
attention of all students of these early periods of Peninsular 



58 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

This was the last and crowning victory of Affonso 
Henriquez. In the same year he died, worn out by 
age, and his death perhaps hastened by this last great 
exploit. ' This prince,' says the Chronicle of the 
Goths, ' was a great lover of his people and a devout 
Christian ; he defended all Portugal with his sword ; 
he acquired a kingdom, and he extended the confines 
of Christendom from the river Mondego on one side 
as far as to the Guadalquivir, which flows by the 
walls of Seville, and on the other side to the Mediter- 
ranean Sea and the shores of the great ocean.' 

These are the words, rising to a pitch of unac- 
customed enthusiasm, of an almost contemporary 
annalist ; but we, of a later age, who know the long 
vicissitudes of Portuguese history, can perceive that 

history : namely, the frequent difficulty of reconciling the state- 
ments of Christian and of Moslem chroniclers. That the Emir 
Yusuf invaded Portugal in 1184, that he laid siege to Santarem, 
that the siege was raised by the Portuguese, that the Moors were 
driven across the Tagus and the Emir was killed, are all incon- 
testable facts. The Arab chroniclers speak of the previous de- 
spatch of a portion of the invading host southward, of a surprise 
arid a panic in the Moorish camp. It appears to me that their 
account of these events is an attempt to make as little as possible of 
the great Christian triumph at Santarem. I give the narrative in 
my text with as much assurance as a man can feel who draws 
from the scanty and contradictory records of such distant times, 
and I consider that my version has sufficient voucher, for reasons 
which I have not space to enter into. I take this opportunity of 
saying that although I have consulted all accessible original 
authorities, and written no descriptive line of city, battlefield, 
river, or mountain-range, but after actual presence on the spot, I 
owe no light obligation to Senhor Herculano, whose enlightened 
and learned labours, and whose fine sequacious narrative of the 
reigns of the early Portuguese monarchs, place him in the very 
first rank of modern historians. 



THE FIRST KING OF PORTUGAL. 59 

lie accomplished for his country far more than this. 
He did what it is better to do for a people than to 
bestow upon them any extension of territory, He 
taught them the strength of the coherent loyalty of a 
whole nation ; he showed them how their indepen- 
dence was possible, in despite of the smallness of their 
numbers, of their poverty, and of their ignorance of 
the arts of war-. He showed them the value of constitu- 
tional freedom ; he taught them how the hardest of all 
political problems may be solved, how independence 
can be preserved, and freedom not compromised ; and 
he kindled a fire of patriotism and of loyalty in the 
nation which has never been extinguished through 
long periods of national reverses and depression. 

These lessons have not been wasted on the Portu- 
guese. If the nation lost its liberties during one 
short period, it has never lost the sense of what those 
liberties were worth ; and Portugal presents at this 
day the unique spectacle of a nation of Southern race 
which can safely be trusted with a political liberty, 
free from the tyranny of rulers on the one hand, and 
from the dictation of the populace on the other. 

The King died at Coimbra, which, once on the 
Moorish frontier, had become by his conquests the 
central city of the kingdom. They carried his body 
for burial to the conventual church of Santa Cruz, in 
that city. More than three centuries afterwards, the 
prosperous and peaceful King Emmanuel thought to 
honour his remains by building a gorgeous church in 
the flamboyant style of architecture on the site of the 
ancient building. 



60 



PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 



The body of the great founder of the Portuguese 
monarchy was disinterred, clad in the crimson mantle 
of the Military Order of A viz, which he had instituted. 
The corpse was enthroned, crowned, and done 
homage to as a living sovereign and saint by King 
Emmanuel and all his nobility. Then was he re- 
interred under a splendid mausoleum in the newly 
finished building. The body of Alfonso Henriquez 
lies there to this day. Other tombs of kings, prelates, 
and nobles, adorn the chapels and chancels of this 
magnificent church. It is a desecration. No tawdry 
architecture should surround the grave, and no 
meaner dust should mingle with that of this mighty 
Warrior King. 




CHAPEL NEAR GUIMARAENS, WHERE APFONSO HENRIQUEZ IS SAID TO 
HAVE BEEN CHRISTENED. 



61 



CHAPTER III. 

THE POETRY OF THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 

The Portuguese subjects of King Affonso Henri quez 
spoke a language which may be termed pure Portu- 
guese in the same sense that the language into which 
our King iElfred translated the works of Basel a and 
of Orosius is sometimes called pure English. The 
Portuguese written in the reign of King Affonso 
Henriquez is nevertheless hardly more intelligible to 
a modern Portuguese than the king's English of 
iElfred's time is to Englishmen of the present day. 

As our own language is the direct outcome of the 
historical events which made us Englishmen, so also 
the Portuguese kingdom and language both had their 
birth in the same era. In other words, the dialect 
of the Portuguese portion of the Peninsula began to 
detach itself more entirely from the other Teuton o- 
Latin forms of speech around it, at the period when, 
as I have already mentioned, the King of Leon and 
Castile conferred upon Count Henry of Burgundy the 
governorship of Northern Portugal. The language 
spoken in the dominions of Count Henry was, it is 
nearly certain, identical with, or at least similar to, 



62 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

that spoken in Galicia. Whether the Galician tongue 
crossed the Minho with the invading arms of Count 
Henry's suzerain, or whether it already prevailed in 
the district south of that river, is not now very easy 
to determine. Certain it is that, at this period, the 
Galician was, of all the dialects which the corrupted 
forms of the Latin was assuming in the Peninsula, 
the most cultivated and the most perfect. As the 
Portuguese nation became more isolated from its 
neighbours, the language would acquire a character 
of its own in its progress towards full development ; 
and the influence of a Burgundian ruler and his 
Burgundian courtiers, soldiers, and adherents, would, 
no doubt, add certain elements of refinement and 
variety to the language of his subjects. The province 
of the Minho, the most northern of Portugal, was, at 
the outset of the kingdom, at once the seat of govern- 
ment and the cradle of the language; and we may 
presume that, as the districts to the south were 
successively wrested from the Moors, the original 
Galician or quasi-Galician dialect of the Minhotes, 
would advance southwards with the arms of the 
Christians, and finally become the language of the 
whole of Portugal. 

At this stage of Portuguese history men's minds 
would seem to have been too much engrossed with 
the great continuous war which the nation was 
waging with the Moors, and with the Leonese and 
Castilians, to be able to give much attention to any 
sort of poetry, except short lyrical pieces touching 
upon war or love. Hardly any others have come 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 63 

down to us. There is no great early Portuguese 
epic, like the 4 Cicl ' ; l though the struggle with the 
infidels was as fierce, and the triumph of the Chris- 
tians as great, in Portugal as in Spain. In all pro- 
bability the poetry of the country was in the hands 
of the wandering troubadours from Provence, and 
the native bards would not have cared to be heard 
in the presence of such masters of song as these. It 
is noticeable that the earlier remains we have of 
native verse are mostly sacred poetry — precisely 
such a class of effusion as the professional minstrels 
would be the least apt to produce. It is quite certain, 
however, that neither poets nor poetry were despised 
at this early period, either in Portugal or the neigh- 
bouring kingdom ; and if no other record of their 
good repute existed, proof might be found in the fact 
that, of all the Portuguese poets whose name or fame 
has come down to us, in the thirteenth and fourteenth 
centuries all were courtiers, knights of high birth, 
princes of the blood, or kings, 

Among a warlike people like the Portuguese, 
called upon at this period continually to maintain 
their existence by arms, we may imagine that the 
Court and the camp were the centres of such literary 

1 Some fragments of a rhymed chronicle relating to the Moor- 
ish wars have indeed come down to us. It is doubtfully ascribed 
to the earliest period of Portuguese history. It has no poetical 
merit whatever, nor any claim to notice beyond its antiquity. The 
Portuguese fragment — we have only a few stanzas left — is certainly 
of much earlier date than the Cid ballads, as to which magnificent 
epic nothing is more certain than that it is the work of a writer 
who lived long after the events he celebrates. 



64 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

activity as existed. The earliest remains we have of 
the language are fragments of the poets Herminguez 
and Egaz Moniz, who are generally held to have 
written in the reign of King Alfonso Henriquez. 
These verses are, it is true, scarcely recognisable as 
Portuguese : they are uncouth and rugged to a most 
singular degree, and yet they are ascribed to two 
courtiers, who presumably wrote and spoke the lan- 
guage in its fullest purity. 

During the generations which intervene between 
this period and the birth of Sa cle Miranda, the great 
poet who takes the place that Chaucer holds with us, 
all such Portuguese poetry as existed was thoroughly 
imbued with the spirit of Provencal verse. The trou- 
badours and the jongleurs, the composers and the 
singers of Provencal song, found, as we know, con- 
genial audiences at the northern Courts of the 
Peninsula. The Catalan, the Castilian, and the 
Galician, or Portuguese, were so like their own 
tongue that these minstrels would be understood 
almost as well where these languages were current as 
at Avignon or Toulouse. As the Portuguese gradually 
extended their kingdom, and thus isolated themselves 
more and more from their neighbours, as the nation 
grew in strength and importance, and, perhaps, as the 
native taste began to rise superior to the monotonous 
frivolity of Provencal minstrelsy, so the language 
began to assume the characteristics of modern Portu- 
guese. Cristovao Falcao, and the more famous 
Bernardim Ribeyro, are the first native poets who 
attained any kind of lasting celebrity in Portugal. 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 65 

Both poets wrote in the generation preceding that 
in which the Sa cle Miranda lived and nourished. The 
language was now true modern Portuguese ; but while 
their eclogues and lyrics have some national charac- 
teristics of earnestness and truth of feeling, the verses 
of these writers are still redolent of the tedious con- 
ceits and affectations of Provencal poetry, and yet 
have little of the flow, melody, and artistic finish of 
the best troubadour lyrics. 

In noting the changes which, throughout the 
Peninsula, were transforming the narrow spirit of 
Provencal verse into the higher and better poetry 
which prevailed during the sixteenth century, the 
unquestionably great influence of the Moors must not 
be overlooked. It has been over hastily concluded 
by some native chroniclers and historians that the 
relations between the conquered and the conquerors 
— who were, during so many centuries, masters of 
nearly the whole Peninsula — were entirely hostile and 
antagonistic. The rule of the Saracens was, however, 
as is now well established, on the whole tolerant ; 
and an immense Christian population, the Mozarabs, 
came strongly under their influence, and adopted not 
only the Arab dress, the Arab language, the domestic 
habits,the arts and intellectual culture of their masters, 
but in some cases carried imitation so far as to practise 
the most characteristic rite of the Moslems. 

It was impossible but that the high literary cul- 
ture of the Saracens, so intimately brought to bear 
on a less cultivated people, should have a strong 
influence on their poetry. It most certainly did have 

F 



66 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

its effect ; but, on the other hand, it must be recol- 
lected that the ultimate deliverers of Peninsular soil 
from Moorish occupation were men who, in the 
retreats and fastnesses of the northern parts of their 
country — from whence they issued for its re-conquest 
— had been, least of any of their countrymen, subject to 
Saracenic influences ; and that it was chiefly, as I have 
already shown, among the camps and in the various 
Courts of the Portuguese and Spanish conquerors that 
the national poetry was produced and fostered. 

The Castilians had, in the fifteenth century, 
while preserving much of the Provencal spirit in 
their poetry, incorporated with it a certain national 
strength and gravity ; and their compositions are far in 
advance of those of their Portuguese contemporaries. 
Though Portugal began her literary career earlier 
than Castile, and her poets undoubtedly wrote much 
more, I have found absolutely nothing in the poetry 
of the smaller kingdom during the whole of this cen- 
tury to compare with the beautiful coplas of Jose 
Manrique, or even the verses of Juan de Mena or 
the Marquis de Santillana. 

In the change that came over Peninsular litera- 
ture in the early part of the sixteenth century, Por- 
tugal took as great a part as even Castile. The final 
expulsion of the Moors in the reign of Ferdinand and 
Isabella gave leisure for the cultivation of new forms 
of poetry ; and the subsequent accession of a German 
prince to the throne, and the greater intercourse, 
during the reign of Charles V., between the Peninsula 
and the various nations of Europe, led, among other 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 67 

reforms and innovations, to the introduction of the 
more artistic taste and handling of the Italians in 
literature. Boscan and Garcilaso de la Vega, the 
chief originators and assertors of the new style, 
wrote sonnets in the manner of Petrarch and eclogues 
in that of Sannazaro, in which Italian elegance and 
Castilian vigour are blended with a success which has 
never been surpassed. These men were the con- 
temporaries of the Portuguese Sa de Miranda ; and 
this great genius, besides being the father of all that 
was good in the poetry of his native land, influenced 
and reformed the literature of the Spaniards hardly 
less than the two Castilian poets I have just named. 

It is generally the first few steps from the rude 
popular ballad or doggrel satire towards the refine- 
ments of cultivated or, so to say, literary poetry, that 
decide the poetic future of a young nation. Then 
only is the language thoroughly plastic, and it is well 
for that nation if it be moulded by the hand of a man 
of genius. Poets later on may have greater skill 
with the instrument, but it is the first great poet alone 
who has made it what it is and shaped the very stops 
which he touches. I think I am right in saying that 
the transition from barbarism to refinement is always 
more or less sudden and more or less complete. It 
was remarkably so in the case of Portugal. 

The poet Miranda seems to have been born at an 
hour propitious to Portuguese literature. Towards 
the end of the fifteenth century the Portuguese 
language had grown into some degree of maturity 
and copiousness. The fame, power, and wealth of 

v 2 



68 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

the nation were at their zenith, and men's desire had 
been awakened for something beyond the rhymed 
chronicles and the simple lyrics of their fathers. Sa 
de Miranda was, by training and native power, the 
very man to stamp his own genius on the poetry of 
his country. The son of a country gentleman of 
good family, he became a student and professor of 
jurisprudence, and attained to high legal learning. 
He visited most of the Courts and cities of southern 
Europe, and, returning to his native country, became 
a courtier ; but after some trial of this existence he 
retired into the country, where he passed the re- 
mainder of his life. 

Almost all that is known of the history of Miranda 
is contained in an anonymous memoir, prefixed to an 
edition of his works published in 1614, and which 
there is reason to believe was written, thirty or forty 
years after the poet's death, by a nobleman who 
married Miranda's granddaughter. This quaintly 
written memoir gives interesting particulars of 
Miranda's habits and way of life, and affords a curious 
insight into the life of an educated Portuguese 
country gentleman of the sixteenth century. 

' Francisco de Sa de Miranda,' says the memoir, 
which I translate freely ard slightly abridge, ' was 
born in Coimbra, in the year of our Lord 1495, the 
year in which the King, Don Manuel' (that is, 
Emmanuel, the Fortunate, of Portugal), ' took his seat 
on the throne. After his first study of the human- 
ities, in which he acquired distinction, he applied 
himself to the law, less from inclination than to 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 69 

please King John III., who had then re-established the 
University ; and at his father's wish he continued this 
study, and arrived at great learning, took the degree 
of Doctor of Law, and more than once filled the 
Professor's chair. Nevertheless, because he knew 
the danger that the use of this study may occasion 
to the judgment, no sooner was his father dead than 
he abandoned the schools and refused the office of 
Desembargador (Judge of Appeal), remaining only in 
the University that he might apply himself to the 
study of philosophy, chiefly that of the Stoics, to 
which his character inclined ; and because this study 
caused him to despise the things of this life, he 
desired to travel through the world, in order that 
the repose to which he resolved to betake himself 
thereafter should never be broken in upon by the 
hearing of new things of which he had had no 
experience. He therefore went to Italy, after first 
seeing all the principal cities of Spain, and after 
visiting at his leisure Borne, Venice, Naples, Milan, 
and Florence, and the best part of Sicily, he returned 
to Portugal, and spent some time in the Court of 
King John III., and there, solely by his personal 
qualities and by his parts, without any such 
advantages as some men — often unworthy ones- 
possess, he made himself such a standing that he 
became one of the foremost courtiers if not the very 
first of the day ; and this estimation he was held in by 
the King as well as by his own companions, and what 
is more to the purpose, by those worthy men who 
choose their friends among such as are " more easily 



70 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

broken than bent " (to quote the poet's own verse), 
and who despise the esteem of ordinary men, holding 
it a direct hurt to them only if they are blamed and 
set at nought by those who detest vice in general. 

' However, this good standing of Miranda at Court 
did not last long. If it had, our poet might in some 
sort be said to be greater than envy itself, as Quin- 
tus Curtius said of Alexander ; but envy could not 
pardon him, which stirred up to his injury a person 
very powerful at that period, who chose to apply to 
himself the character of Alexis in Miranda's eclogue ; 
and the poet, not caring to suffer the effects of this 
wrath, accepted the office of Master or Bailiff of a 
Commandery of Knights of the Order of Christ, es- 
tablished near Ponte de Lima, retired to a country 
house in the neighbourhood belonging to him, named 
Tapada, abandoning the Court and the society of his 
friends and all his hopes of advancement, and here 
he remained, enjoying in peace the fruit of his 
studies and travel. Here also he married Donna 
Brialonja d'Azevedo, daughter of Francisco Machado, 
Lord of Lousaa de Crasto d'Arega and of the lands 
lying between the rivers Homem and Cavado ; with 
which lady he lived many years in great conformity, 
she nevertheless being of little beauty (exterior beauty) 
and of so advanced an age, that when he asked her in 
marriage of her brothers (for her father was dead) they 
put him off until, they said, he should first have a good 
sight of the bride ; and when she was brought in by 
her brothers, he said to her, — "Eeproach me, dear lady, 
for this, that I have been so long of asking for you." 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 71 

4 It would appear that as Sa de Miranda lived in 
a way so abstracted from the world lie was quite 
equal to his scheme of life in this matter, and be sure 
he did not lack the example of some ancient philoso- 
pher to guide him. He esteemed above everything 
the qualities of this lady, which indeed were incom- 
parable, according to the testimony of men of that 
place, who even to this day speak of her zeal in the 
honour of God, in the ease of her husband, in the 
training up of her children, and in the good and profit- 
able ordering of her household. Insomuch that her 
husband loved her so dearly that when she died he 
lost all joy of his life, and shortly afterwards died 
too, in grief of mind, which if not worthy of a man 
who professed the Stoic philosophy, yet testifies how 
greatly he esteemed and loved her whom he had 
lost. 

4 Sa de Miranda,' says the biographer, * was a man 
of middle height, thick-set in make, of a pale but not 
sallow complexion, with remarkably white hands ; 
his eyes rather large, of a greyish-blue and with a 
kindly expression in them, the nose long and aquiline. 
He was grave in character, of a melancholic humour, 
but easy and affable in conversation : a man more 
sparing of laughter than of speech. He was fond of 
wolf hunting, and likewise of using the knightly 
exercises of the tilting-yard. He played upon the 
violin, and though not over rich he had in his service 
several professors of music' 

Such was the man who, at a time when the general 
corruption which pervaded Portuguese society was pre- 



72 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

paring the country for the great national catastrophe 
which was soon to overtake it, was at once a patriot 
and a poet. He used his great gifts for the noblest 
purposes, to warn and to teach. He warned his 
countrymen against the bigotry of priests, the grasp- 
ing dishonesty of statesmen, and their own heedless- 
ness of the future. His denunciations were too 
eloquent to be unheard, but they were unheeded. 
Miranda laid the foundations of a noble national 
literature — but for him Camoens could not have 
written his great epic ; yet his greatest praise is that 
he preserved his good faith among the faithless, and 
that he had the courage to speak the truth when not 
to be silent was a danger. . 

In applying, as I have done, the term 'renaiss- 
ance ' to the revolution which Sa de Miranda was 
chiefly instrumental in bringing about in Portuguese 
literature, I wish to guard against the acceptance of 
that somewhat abused word in any narrow sense. 
The renaissance which took place was not a simple 
revival of the purer classic forms of antiquity, but a 
strengthening and enlarging of the whole scope and 
purposes of poetry. It was a moral as well as a 
poetical Aufkldrung^ or enlightenment. Under the 
new influences, the aims of poetry grew higher, its 
sympathies wider, its morality purer ; but the actual 
form in which poetic thought was cast was by no 
means, at least for the time, improved. Indeed, the 
verse of the earlier reformers of it will bear no com- 
parison in fluency and sweetness with the poetry 
which it displaced. The renaissance was a reaction 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 73 

against the narrowness of the models which had pre- 
vailed since the beginning of Provencal song, an out- 
growth of its bonds rather than a continuation of the 
same modes of thought recast into better form. 

Miranda wrote much in the Castilian tongue. Of 
his eight eclogues, six, and those the best, are in that 
language. The Castilian was an instrument ready to 
his hand, far more polished than the Portuguese ; and 
Miranda, a man of refined tastes, a scholar, a traveller, 
and a courtier, may, in spite of his love of country, 
have a little despised his native tongue as a vehicle 
for poetic thought. The eclogues, sonnets, and 
quintilhas, which he wrote in the language of Castile, 
are ranked as highly by Spaniards as any similar 
works of Spanish poets. Yet it may almost be 
doubted if Miranda did well to neglect the Portuguese 
language, which in some respects is admirably fitted 
for lyrical expression. In comparison with Spanish, 
it may be said of Portuguese that, while it lacks some 
of the sonorous vigour of that magnificent language, 
it has greatly the advantage over it in modulation, 
smoothness, and fluency, from the absence of the 
guttural sounds of the Castilian. Compared with 
Italian — which neither Portuguese nor any other 
language can approach in grace and delicacy — the 
Portuguese is certainly less effeminate in sound, and 
is also entirely free from those most unpleasing com- 
binations of two or three consonants which it would 
seem to be the constant task of Italian poets to weed 
from their poems. 

Before I proceed to give some specimens of 



74 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

Miranda's Portuguese poetry, I would premise that, 
in so far as style and expression are concerned, they 
are, with some exceptions, signally inferior to his 
Spanish writings, upon which his fame chiefly rests. 
Miranda's Portuguese and his Spanish poetry might, 
indeed, easily be ascribed to two different writers ; so 
clear, fluent, and melodious is the one, and so austere, 
inharmonious, and often obscure is the other. 

Now, it may perhaps be asserted that the qualities 
of lucidity and harmony are, beyond all others, the 
very soul of great poetry — that other qualities are 
subordinate to these — that those subtle, untranslatable 
harmonies of utterance constitute, when they clothe 
great ideas, poetry of the highest class ; and if it 
should fail of attaining a high degree of such harmony, 
by so much does it stop short of being the highest 
kind of poetry. The best poetry is, it must be 
admitted, untranslatable in any true sense, and it 
may perhaps some day come to be asked how far the 
valuable time and labour of so many of the ablest men 
among us are profitably expended upon the great and 
growing number of rhymed translations of the poets 
of antiquity. I am inclined to think that something 
far short of perfect acquaintance with a foreign or 
dead language will enable a reader to appreciate many 
of the beauties of its literature. There is even, as I 
believe, in these word-harmonies of which I have 
spoken, much which forms a language common to all' 
those persons, foreigners or not, who are capable of 
their perception, just as a symphony of Beethoven is 
as intelligible to an Englishman as to a German. 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 75 

These views have led me to give literal and un- 
rhymecl translations of the specimens of Portuguese 
poetry which I am about to lay before the reader- — 
preserving only such an approximation to the rhythm 
and metre as could be got without much deviation 
from literalness, and leaving to the reader the task of 
gathering, with this slight assistance, the form and 
spirit of the original from the original itself. 

Miranda's Portuguese writings consist of epistles, 
sonnets, eclogues, and two comedies. Of these, the 
epistles are perhaps the most important works. They 
are addressed, some to the King, some to different 
friends, and one to the poet Ferreira. These epistles 
are quite original in style and handling, and are, I 
think, what the Portuguese themselves chiefly admire 
in the poet's works. Composed in short-versed stanzas 
of three, four, or five lines each, their form suits and 
excuses their direct style and their frequent and abrupt 
transitions. The epistle addressed to the King is the 
most characteristic, if not the most elegant. It con- 
sists of eighty-one stanzas of five lines each ; and is^ 
therefore, longer than I can afford space to quote in 
its entirety. Written in easy, flowing verse, the 
rhyming of so many lines within so short a stanza 
gives a considerable swing and vigour to the measure 
used by the poet. The stanza employed is the 
quintilha of five short lines, of which as a rule the 
first, third, and last rhyme, as also do the second 
and fourth. The versification is generally metrical, 
but here and there it has to be read by accent or 
cadence, without regard to the number of feet. 



76 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

The epistle begins by a somewhat obsequious 
address to the King, which contrasts with the exceed- 
ing plain speaking of the remainder. Addressing 
him as King of many Kings, in allusion to the extended 
conquests of the Portuguese of that time, he hardly 
dares to ask for the royal attention, since it must be 
occupied with affairs of state. 

Que em outras partes da Esphera. 
Em outros ceos differentes, 
Que Deus tegora escondera, 
Cada huma de tantas gentes 
Vossos despachos espera. 

Since in so many different regions, 
Under so many other skies, 
Hidden till now by Providence, 
Such a multitude of nations 
Your high commands are waiting for. 

To administer justice, if necessary in the most 

summary manner, is, says the poet, the first duty of a 

king. Then follows a long argument in favour of 

monarchy. The poet is careful to exclude tyrants 

and usurpers, and confines himself to reys ungidos 

— anointed kings — who are to redress the people's 

grievances, succour the poor, and forcibly put down 

the wrong. He goes on to say : — 

As vossas vellas que vao 
Dando quasi ao mundo volta 
Raramente encontrarao 
Gente de algum rey solta. 
Sem cabe9a, o corpo he vao. 

The royal ships which sail around 
Almost the circuit of the globe, 
Will seldom anywhere encounter 
Society without a king. 
Without a head, a nation dies. 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 77 

Having established the necessity of some sort of 
mild paternal despotism, by a series of arguments and 
illustrations drawn from nature and from history, and 
of a sort which bear a striking resemblance to the 
reasoning in Lord Brookes' poetical ' Treatise of 
Monarchic,' written some fifty years afterwards, he 
proceeds to the chief object of his epistle — to warn 
the King and his countrymen against the intrigues of 
courtiers. The experience of a former courtier is 
obvious in the force and bitterness with which he 
inveighs on this topic. 

Yelem-se com tudo os reys 
Dos rostos falsos, e manhas, 
Com que lhes fazem das leys 
Fracas teas das aranhas. 

Let kings be ever on their guard 
Of false men and of their false wiles, 
With which their wont is our just laws 
To sweep aside, like spiders' webs. 

Such men, he says, only value virtue or justice 
by what it will fetch in the market. 

Quern graga ante el rey alcanga 
E hi falla o que nao deve 
(Mai grande de ma privanga) 
Pegonha na fonte langa, 
De que toda a terra bebe. 

The men who win the royal favour 
By flattery and unworthy arts 
(111 consequence of friendship base) 
Throw poison in the fountain head, 
Envenom what the people drink. 



78 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

Then comes a stanza which has been quoted 

perhaps as often as any passage in Portuguese 

poetry : — 

Homem d'um so parecer, 
D'um so rosto, d'unia so fe, 
D 'antes quebrar que torcer, 
Elle tudo pode ser, 
Mas de Corte homem nao he. 

The man of single countenance, 
Of frank address and simple faith, 
Readier to be broke than bended, 
May be anything he chooses, 
But the Court he should eschew. 

These lines and those in the succeeding stanza 
have been applied, and probably with reason, to the 
character of Miranda himself: — 

Gracejar ouco de ca 
De quern vae inteiro, e sao, 
Nem se contrafaz mais la, 
' Como este vem aldeao, 
Que cortezao tornara ! ' 

Estas publicas santidades, 
Estes rostos transport-ados, 
Nao em ermos, mas cidades. 
Para Deos sao vaydades, 
Para nos vao rebugados. 

I seem to hear the sneering speech 
At one who will not counterfeit, 
But shows himself as God has made, 
' Here is a rustic speech and manner, 
See what a courtier he will make ! ' 

This sanctity assumed in public, 
This sadness of feigned piety, 
Is found in Courts, not hermitages. 
God can assess such counterfeits ; 
We must respect the pious mask. 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 79 

He wishes to put the King on his guard against 
these intriguers, their cunning, and their greed. 

Por minas trazem suas azes, 
Encubertos sens assanhos, 
Falsas guerras, falsas pazes, 
De fora sao mansos anhos, 
De dentro, lobos robazes. 

Covered ways hide their attacks, 
Hid is their malice and their rage. 
False enemies and falser friends, 
Lambs are they in outward bearing, 
Ravening wolves they are within. 

He shows how difficult the duplicity of such 
villains makes it to trace malicious actions to their 
actual perpetrators. 

He cites the law of trial by battle, prevailing 
among the Lombards, as a wholesome resource ; and 
recounts the history of the struggle between the 
great King Denis of Portugal and his rebellious son, 
in proof of the necessity of strong measures in such 
times as those in which he was writing, which he 
describes as — 

N'este tempo, quern mal cae 
Mai jaz, e dizem que a luz 
Por tempo a verdade sae ! 
Entretanto poem na cruz 
justo ; o ladrao se vae. 

A time when, if a man once falls, 
He falls for good ; and yet they say 
That truth in time shall see the light ! 
But in our day they crucify 
The good man, while the thief escapes. 



80 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

A patriotic Portuguese of those times (indeed, of 
any times) must ever have had before his eyes the 
peril to his country of ambitious designs on the part 
of Spain. The bloody wars with that country, of the 
earlier years of the monarchy, had ended long enough 
before to incline the Portuguese to forget the danger 
of neighbourhood to so powerful a kingdom. The 
growing conformity in manners, and the identity of 
religion between the two peoples, might further 
serve to lull any latent suspicion of aggressive 
designs on the part of Spain. At this time Spanish 
nobles frequented the Court of Portugal, and probably 
shared more of the royal favour than was generally 
thought desirable. The bold denunciation of Spain 
by the poet must have come with peculiar force from 
a man who had travelled much, and who had enjoyed 
opportunities of closely observing the workings of his 
own, as well as of foreign governments. The following 
is sufficiently outspoken of a nation then ruled over by 
so warlike and aggressive a prince as Charles V. : — 

Geralmente he presumptuosa 
Espanha, e d'isso se preza, 
Gente ousada e bellicosa 
Culpaona de cubiyosa. 
Tudo sabe vossa Alteza. 

Spain is the land of arrogance, 

Whose sons are proud, and vaunt their pride. 

A daring nation, prone to war, 

And blamed for their cupidity. 

Your Majesty best knows their fame. 

He accuses them of a grasping covetousness which 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 81 

leads them to live at the expense of weaker men, and 
dos snores alheos, by others' toil. 

Que eu vejo nos povoados 
Muitos dos salteadores, 
Com nome, e rosto d'honrados. 
Vao quentes, vao forrados 
De pelles de lavradores ! 

How many in our towns I see 
Of these brigands bear about 
The name and look of honest men. 
Brigands ! who go warmly clad 
In the skins of simple men ! 

After some stanzas directed against profligate and 
mercenary priests, the poet bids the King remember 
the vital necessity of perfect impartiality in one who, 
like himself, is, but for the adjustments of the consti- 
tution, almost a despot ; and the more so, that he rests 
his poAver on the love and the loyalty of his subjects, 
unlike the King of France, who has his Scotch body- 
guard, or the Pope, who trusts to Swiss defenders. 

Aqui nam vemos soldados, 
Aqui nam soa atambor. 
Outros reys os seus estados 
Guardao de armas rodeados, 
Yos rodeado de amor. 

Here we have no mercenaries, 

No loyalty by sound of drum. 

Other kings may guard their kingdoms, 

With sword and spear surround the throne ; 

Your sole defence, your people's love. 

He brings the epistle to a conclusion by remind- 
ing the King of his great ancestor, who expressed his 
ideas of government by the noble motto, Polla ley e 
polla grey — ' By law and by my people's will.' 



82 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

Such compositions as this, in spite of their 
wonderful vigour of expression and general elo- 
quence, may seem dull enough to us of a modern 
age ; and it is, indeed, difficult to bring ourselves, at 
the present day, to appreciate their importance and 
their influence on the bygone generations for whom 
they were written. Popular interest in, and sympathy 
with, current political movements, have with ourselves 
for so long a time found such early and constant ex- 
pression in journals, in reviews, and in the multiplied 
reports of all kinds of public speeches and debates, that 
we do not at present require such isolated utterances 
as this. But when there was no newspaper to relate, 
to report, or to criticise ; when news came tardily and 
scantily; when the most eloquent address must have 
died in the memory of its few hearers almost as soon 
as the speaker's voice was silent, the effect of such 
written eloquence as this of Miranda's must have been 
extraordinarily great. 

To Miranda's sonnets I am inclined to attach con- 
siderable importance. True it is that they are formed 
on the model left by Petrarch, that they signally lack 
many of the merits of the Italian sonneteer, and that 
they too frequently reflect the fine-drawn, scholastic 
subtlety with which it was then the fashion for a poet 
to address his friend, his mistress, or his patron. Yet, 
notwithstanding this, and obscure and tortuous as is 
the style of most of them, they bear upon them that 
peculiar exquisiteness of thought and expression for 
which we have no exact name, but which the Greeks 
would have called irony. The melancholy of unre- 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 83 

quited love is the theme of the greater number of 
Miranda's sonnets ; yet the cruelty of the ladies of 
those days is, perhaps, hardly established by the fact 
that they were not won by pleadings which have in 
them a great deal more of the pedantic affectation 
of a schoolman than the genuine ardour of a lover, 

I select for quotation the following two from 
among Miranda's Portuguese sonnets, as much from 
their comparative simplicity as their excellence, and 
from the difficulty of rendering into intelligible 
English the subtle turns of thought in the more 
characteristic sonnets. I do not profess to translate 
literally. 

O sol he grande, caem com a calma as aves, 
Do tempo em tal sazao que soe ser fria : 
Esta agua que d'alto cae accordarmehia 
Do sono nao mas de cuidados graves. 
O cousas todas vas, todas mudaveis, 
Qual lie o coracao que em vos confia ? 
Passando hum dia vae, passa outro dia, 
Incertos todos mais que ao vento as naves. 
Eu vi yk por aqui sombras e flores,, 
Yi aguas e vi fontes, vi verdura, 
As aves vi cantar todas d'amores : 
Mudo e seco he ja tudo e de mistura 
Tambem fazendomi eu fuy d'outras cores 
E tudo o mais renova, isto he sem cura, 



The sun beats fiercely, and the panting birds, 
Exhausted with unwonted heat, fall down ; 
Rain from the parched skies above would break 
Not on my sleep, but on my heavy cares. 
O vanity of earthly things which change, 
Where is the soul who dares to trust to you % 
One day the thing we love is here, the next 
'Tis gone, like wind leaving the idle sail. 

g 2 



84 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

Here, in this spot, lately was pleasant shade, 
Flowers springing through green turf, the cooling gush 
Of waters and the cheerful song of birds : 
Now all is changed, withered and dry and bare. 
Most changed of all am I, for while all this 
Renewal has, I must endure, thus changed. 

A morte de sua mulher. 

Aquelle espirito ja tambem pagado 
Como elle merecia, claro e puro 
Deixou de boa vontade o valle escuro 
De tudo o que ca vio como anojado. 
Aquelle sprito que do mar irado 
D'esta vida mortal posto em seguro 
Da gloria que la tern de herdade e juro, 
Ca nos deixou o caminho abalisado, 
Alma aqui vinda nesta nossa idade 
De ferro, que tornaste a antiga d'ouro. 
Em quanto ca regeste e humanidade 
Em chegando ajuntaste tal thesouro 
Que para sempre dura, ah vaydade ! 
Ricas areas d'este Tejo e Douro. 

The death of his wife. 

Her spirit now has found its true reward, 
That spirit bright and pure, impatient 
To leave the shadowy vale and reach its home — 
Its home congenial in the realms above. 



And now, at last arrived in harbour safe, 

Passing the restless, stormy sea of life, 

Has marked the course on which we, too, should sail. 

Departed soul ! Thy sweetest influence 

Did change this age of ours — an age of iron — 

To one of gold, and in our memories leave 

A treasure to all time. Alas ! how drear, 

Tagus ! thy sands, and golden Douro 's banks. 

The Portuguese eclogues of Miranda are but two 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 85 

in number, while of his Spanish pastorals there are 
four, every one of which is incomparably superior in 
all the characteristic excellences of this kind of poetry 
to those written in Portuguese. 

Of all the writings of Miranda, his eclogues will, 
probably, seem the least interesting to a modern 
reader. The interest which such poems once aroused 
must have been, to a great extent, owing to their 
more or less successful reproduction of classical 
models. It seems, indeed, extraordinary enough that 
such artificial productions could have afforded 
pleasure even in the lack of other literature. They 
have neither incident, nor dramatic dialogue, nor 
plot. The interminable conversations between shep- 
herds and shepherdesses have little of the true flavour 
of pastoral life about them, and either fatigue us by 
their platitude or offend us by their affectation. The 
allusions to the Court life and intrigues of the day 
are, no doubt, more frequent than we can now 
detect, and this source of interest is, therefore, want- 
ing for modern readers. The model followed by 
Portuguese bucolic writers is rather the artificial 
and courtly pastoral of Virgil than the more natural 
one of Theocritus ; but so far as a foreigner may 
presume to judge, the renaissance eclogue, whether 
it be Portuguese, Spanish, or Italian, is signally want- 
ing in the Virgilian ease and beauty of versification. 
The bucolic verse of Miranda, however, if its general 
tenor do not rise much above the level of the pastoral 
writing of his age, possesses a vast superiority to it in 
the poet's descriptions and love of natural scenes and 



86 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

rustic life. The mountains, the streams, the fields, 
and, above all, the animals, are introduced with a 
singular naturalness and obvious knowledge of 
country ways which are very delightful ; and it is in 
this chiefly, I suspect, that reside such vitality and 
value as eclogue writing possesses ; not in the tedious 
commonplaces about peace and virtue put in the 
mouths of impossible shepherds, nor in frigid second- 
hand classicisms, but in the pleasant associations 
which such poems call up of the fresh forest breeze, 
the cool fountains, green turf and leafage, and the 
peaceful country teams and flocks. 

To an ordinary educated Englishman, whose 
literature is less rich in, and whose taste is less 
inclined to the artificial pastoral poem of the 
classical types than those of almost any other Euro- 
pean nation, the eclogue may well seem to be the 
most dreary of all forms of human composition. 
Whether it be owing to the early bent of the Portu- 
guese towards this form of literature, or that it is 
congenial to the national taste, it has happened that 
Portuguese poetry has developed itself strongly in the 
direction of the pastoral idyl. Far as the Spaniards 
have carried excellence in this species of writing, 
they are inferior to the Portuguese, who deserve to 
rank with the Italians. Many circumstances probably 
have concurred to foster this love of pastoral poetry 
in Portugal, and chief among them the extreme 
beauty of its country scenery, the serenity of its cli- 
mate, the temperament of its people, the national 
love of home and homely scenes, and, perhaps as 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 87 

much as anything, the variety and richness of the 
language and its great resemblance to the classic 
tongue in which some of the best models of bucolic 
poetry are to be found. The farm life of Portugal 
is also infinitely more susceptible of poetic treatment 
than that of northern countries, whose soil and cli- 
mate are less kindly, and whose agriculture is more 
advanced. 

The world has come to regard, and not altogether 
without reason, the pastoral existence as depicted by 
Virgil and Theocritus as the most ideal form of rustic 
life ; and this life is, in truth, not very different from 
that followed by husbandmen in Portugal at the pre- 
sent day. It is, indeed, almost inconceivable that 
fourteen centuries should have done so little to 
modify, among an ingenious people, the lessons 
taught them by their first masters in agriculture. 
The farm husbandry practised in Portugal to this 
day is virtually that which the Eoman colonists left 
in the country, and such as is described in the rules 
and precepts of Columella. The Portuguese plough- 
man still works his fields with a plough which is 
identical in shape with the instrument of which Yirgil 
has left a precise description in his eclogues. The 
farmer carries his produce in exactly such an ox-cart 
as we find drawn on Eoman bas-reliefs and vases. 
The Portuguese shepherd in the mountains still lives 
among his flock by day, and lies down to sleep in 
their midst at night. The pastoral pipe of antiquity 
has been replaced by the guitar, but the shepherds 
still challenge each other to compete in alternate ex- 



88 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

tempore verse ao desafio, in rivalry one with the 
other. 

A native of Portugal enjoys, in consequence of 
his familiarity with the actual practice of the old 
classic husbandry, a signal advantage over natives of 
northern countries, in reading the pastorals of the 
ancient authors. Many allusions and illustrations 
will seem clear and natural to the one, which to the 
other are strained and obscure. The amcebcean song 
of shepherds and ploughboys — the very groundwork 
of the bucolic poem— and which a Portuguese hears 
daily on every hill-side, is to a foreigner at first sound 
an almost absurd stretch of conventionality. To give 
a particular instance of such necessary familiarity, 
many an English schoolboy has no doubt been puzzled 
to render the full meaning of Virgil's line, ' Aspice^ 
aratra jugo referunt suspensa juvenci ; ' which the 
dullest Portuguese lad can translate at once, in the 
secondary or poetical sense, to mean that it was 
nightfall., when the ploughmen sling the plough be- 
tween the oxen and carry it home. Such instances 
could easily be multiplied. 

I have not space to quote at any length from 
Miranda's eclogues, and short extracts would neither 
serve to illustrate my opinions nor enable the reader 
to form any of his own. 

Miranda's remaining works are his two comedies. 
Of these it may at once be said that, while they are 
excellent imitations of, or rather adaptations from, the 
Eoman comic drama, they show clearly enough that 
Miranda was not eminently possessed of a strong, 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 89 

original dramatic genius. Yet, short of this praise, 
they are admirable productions. The range of the 
poet's powers was so great that it easily compre- 
hended what was not exactly in the direct line of his 
genius. His plays were probably tasks, rather than 
labours of love ; but, as literary efforts, they are full of 
evidences of an accomplished, many-sided mind, and 
show as wide an acquaintance with men as with 
books. 

The dialogue of both comedies is spirited, con- 
cise, not devoid of finesse, and, above all, natural and 
racy of common colloquial sayings and proverbs ; 
seldom witty, never overwrought in the direction of 
farce, but often charged with a fine, extravagant 
humour, which has more resemblance to the learned 
pleasantry of Jonson than anything to be found in 
the works of other Peninsular dramatists, though 
Miranda falls far short of the dignity and erudition of 
the English playwright. 

In the comedies of Miranda the curtain is raised 
upon a purely conventional life. It is a stage where- 
on appear nearly all the established characters of the 
old Eoman comic drama : the boastful soldier, the 
edacious parasite, the scheming and faithful servant, 
the tyrannical father, and the windy and purposeless 
lover. The plot, the incidents, and the action, all 
run along the ancient classical groove, It is the 
drama of ancient Rome revived with wonderful skill, 
but with as little as possible of the modern spirit. It 
is a renaissance drama, entirely lacking the infusion 
of the deeper purpose and imaginative wealth of 



90 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

modern times, which have given force and vitality to 
the so-called renaissance movement in painting and 
the sister arts. Such a form of drama, capable of 
affording mere amusement as it was in its own day, 
was obviously neither earnest enough, nor varied 
enough, nor true enough, to reach the sympathies of 
audiences of a later age, with enlarged interests, a 
more trained morality, and a stricter social and civil 
polity. This resuscitation of the purely classic 
comic drama in modern times was destined to last 
but a short time. Men were born, even in Miranda's 
lifetime, who were to create the splendid Spanish 
comic drama of the seventeenth century, the truest 
expression of the social life of the age and country of 
its birth ; and when that drama arose, the old classic 
style disappeared at once and for ever. 

Quotations from either of the poet's plays would 
serve little useful purpose. The comedies themselves 
are, it must be admitted, rather dull reading ; and 
any true perception of their excellences is only to be 
got by a comparison with similar imitations of the 
comedies of Plautus and Terence, and by clothing the 
bare ideas of the author with the speech and gesture 
of the actor. Such « reading between the lines ' is 
especially necessary in the conventionally framed 
plays of Miranda, abounding as they do in passages 
which only the manner and skill of a good actor could 
make endurable, and, above all, in soliloquies of -a 
length which might seem intolerable to the mere 
reader, if he did not remember that such monologues 
afford extraordinary scope for either tragic or comic 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 91 

power, and that some of the best acting French and 
Spanish plays extant are full of them. 

The influence of Miranda over his contemporaries 
was not confined to his writings. A man of easy and 
accessible conversation, who had seen much of the 
world as an observer, rather than as an actor in it ; a 
professor at a university which was the centre of the 
intellectual activity of the kingdom ; the most famous 
author in Portugal, and amongst the foremost poets 
of the neighbouring nation ; he became the leader, 
and, indeed, the oracle of his contemporaries. He 
had rescued the national literature almost from bar- 
barism. He had discerned, or, rather, created wealth 
and beauty of expression in a language the most 
neglected and despised of all the romance tongues of 
southern and eastern Europe, He was reverenced 
and he was imitated by a host of men, some of whom 
rose at once into prominence. 

Of his immediate contemporaries, far the most 
eminent was Antonio Ferreira, a poet who, himself 
the friend and imitator of Miranda, has left his mark 
on the poetic literature of his country almost as 
plainly as his master. 

Ferreira's style is more classical, more correct, 
more polished, and, to a foreigner, infinitely more easy 
and intelligible than that of Miranda. Though Ferre- 
ira was but a generation the younger, more than a 
century separates their styles : that of the one, crabbed 
and antiquated ; that of the other, as near to modern 
Portuguese as the English of Queen Anne's reign is 
to the English written by Wordsworth or Tennyson. 



92 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

Of Ferreira's life we know little but that it was 
respectable and uneventful. Born in 1528, lie was 
thirty- three years younger than Miranda, and, like 
him, he studied law, and became a professor in the 
University of Coimbra. Before he had attained his 
twenty-ninth year he had written eclogues, sonnets, 
epistles, and a comedy. From Coimbra he migrated 
to the Court of King John III., where he was well 
received. He obtained a high judicial appointment 
at Lisbon, and shortly afterwards he died of the plague 
at the untimely age of forty-one, in the midst of fame 
and growing honours. 

The great distinction between the two poets re- 
sides in this, that while Miranda was half-hearted 
in the use of his native language, and wrote better 
and more freely in a more cultivated foreign tongue, 
Ferreira — vestigia Groeca ausus deserere — resolved 
from the first to write no single line except in Portu- 
guese. 

He did not court any fame that was not won in 
the Portuguese field of literature, or that was bestowed 
by other than Portuguese voices. Prefixed to the first 
collection of his works is a sonnet in which he says 
that all the renown he desires is that of being thought 
a patriotic Portuguese, who loved his native land and 
his own people :— 

Eu desta gloria so fico contente, 

<^ue a minha terra amei, e a minha gente. 

This emphatic and amiable patriotism has particu- 
larly endeared the memory, and probably not a little 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 93 

enhanced the influence, of Ferreira with his fellow- 
countrymen, among whom love of country has always 
possessed the intensity of a passion. 

Ferreira, like Miranda, wrote epistles, but their 
elegant classicism has nothing in common with the 
forcible manner of Miranda. They are grave and 
didactic in their style, the utterances of a scholar 
who had always shunned the business of the world, 
rather than of a man who, like Miranda, had lived in 
it and knew it ; of a man more taken up with the 
elegances of literature than interested in the schemes 
and passions of his fellow -men. The epistles and the 
odes of Ferreira are greatly praised and appreciated 
by his countrymen, and have, I believe, more than all 
his other writings, earned for him the title of the 
Portuguese Horace. Both in his odes and in his 
epistles he is a palpable and avowed imitator of 
Horace, and it is precisely this departure from 
originality which makes these productions of compara- 
tively little interest to a foreign student of the 
language ; but their influence, on this very account, 
upon the literature of his country was great. Ferreira's 
example has unquestionably contributed to the correc- 
tion in Portuguese poetic diction of a certain bombas- 
tic fullness and Oriental exaggeration, which were 
characteristics of Peninsular national literature in his 
own day, and have not even yet entirely disappeared. 
Assuming that our Northern taste is correct in the 
matter, he must, by an Englishman, a German, or a 
Frenchman, be held to have been the greatest reformer 
and improver of the taste of his countrymen. 



94 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

It may of course be asked, Is our taste in such 
matters supremely good ? and is it not perhaps as 
much what it is from the poverty of our imagination as 
from the soundness of our judgment ? Whether it be 
good or bad, literary taste in Portugal ranges itself on 
the French and English side in the controversy, and 
not with the Spaniards. The Portuguese began to be 
6 regular ' and ' correct,' before even the French did, 
and since Ferreira wrote there has never been such a 
thing possible as a Portuguese Calderon, Eojas, or 
Lope da Vega, and a Portuguese Cervantes has never 
been possible either before or since the time of Ferreira. 
If Shakespeare had written in Portuguese, many of 
his lines would have shocked Portuguese audiences, 
and Marlowe's ' mighty line ' and ' fine madness ' would 
have been an utter abomination to any Portuguese of 
taste. 

I wish to make a special point of this distinction 
between the two literatures. That extravagance and 
wild incongruity of poetic diction which our Elizabe- 
thans caught from the Spaniards, and in which con- 
temporary Englishmen delighted, that quality in lite- 
rature, which gave pleasure to such critics as Lamb 
and Hazlitt, has never been countenanced by the 
Portuguese : it has never ceased to find favour in 
Spain. This it is which differentiates the two peoples 
as well as their literatures. 

Climas passe, mude constellaciones 
Golfos innavegables navegando. 

This not very remarkable couplet — the first that 
comes to my memory as likely to serve — will illustrate 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 95 

as well as any other passage a certain vital difference 
between the Spanish and Portuguese notions of poetry. 
The lines come from the ' Araucana ' of the Spanish 
poet Alonzo de Ercila y Zuniga, an epic of great 
length, in which Voltaire, who, I would undertake to 
say, never read it, saw an Iliad, and Sismondi, who 
probably did get through the poem, not at all more 
wisely, a newspaper in rhyme. 

Plenty of verses such as these may be found in 
the ' Araucana,' and many more as good or better are 
dispersed through Spanish poetry. I will defy any 
one to match them in Portuguese. There is plenty 
of sound reasonableness in Spain, and in the poetry 
of Spain, but Spaniards like sometimes to get out of 
the groove of reasonableness and sound logic, and 
they have often the art of doing it without any sort 
of foolishness. The Portuguese have too much of 
that moderation of judgment which common-place 
people like to ascribe to themselves and to call com- 
mon sense, to do anything of the kind. To be sure 
they like sometimes to 4 write fine,' but when they do, 
it is in the penny journal style — stilted stuff There is 
none of the fine Spanish flavour in the performance. 
The Spaniard is bombastic enough sometimes, but 
there is often a magnificence in his very bombast, a 
splendid extravagance of humour or of rhetoric. 

Even in this rather poor couplet which I have 
quoted, and quoted because it has no unusual force, 
there is a certain largeness of conception of a kind 
which no Portuguese would rise to. Climas passe — 
I not only changed climates in my voyagings, I passed 



96 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

them on my road as a wayfarer might milestones. 
Mude con c <tellaciones. What a grand astronomical cli- 
max ! Nothing bnt downright hyperbole can take after 
that, and we get it in golfos innavegables navegando ! 
Logic toils after such a poet in vain. The seas were 
not navigable, you say — then pray, how came you 
to sail over them ? Of course in the answer to be 
given to such a query lies the whole gist, point, savour, 
and excellence of much Spanish writing, with the 
pomp and prodigality of which let no critic too sternly 
quarrel until he have learned how the members of 
this syllogism are to be reconciled. 

Ferreira's eclogues do not conspicuously rise 
above the standard of the pastoral writing of his day. 
They lack the stamp of reality which Miranda has 
left impressed on his pastoral writings, but in elegance 
and grace of diction Ferreira attains a high degree of 
excellence. Many passages of exquisite beauty may 
be found throughout these productions, but it must 
be admitted that as literary compositions they are 
seldom anything but tedious. The amazingly rapid 
progress of the language in the direction of grace and 
smoothness may be instanced in the following passage 
from the first eclogue ; — 

Esta f'onte ouvio hoje aqui meu pranto : 
E como se o sentisse, parecia 
Qu'ajudava entoar tarn triste canto. 
Hora fazia pausa, hora coma 
Com murmurio hora grave, e hora agudo, 
Disseras qu'algum sprito ali avia. 

This fountain heard me, in my verse, complain, 
And, as if sentient too, in unison 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 97 

Joined with its harmonies in my refrain ; 

Now it did pause, and now again run on 

With murmurs hoarse at times, now shriller grown, 

As if some spirit there did make its moan. 

Passing over, from lack of space to quote them, 
the numerous sonnets of Ferreira — many of them 
masterpieces of this refined and difficult kind of com- 
position — and the comedies of Bristo and Cioso, in 
which the poet would seem to have feared to move 
beyond the narrow classic groove in which his prede- 
cessor had written his comic dramas, I propose to 
devote the space at my command to an examination 
of Ferreira's tragedy of Castro — the best and indeed 
almost the only high-class tragedy in the Portuguese 
language, and, in my opinion, by far the greatest 
work of its author. 

The wonderful history of Inez de Castro, the 
Spanish mistress, and perhaps, ultimately, the wedded 
wife of Prince Pedro, son of Affonso IV. of Portu- 
gal, is too deeply engraved on the memory of all 
Portuguese to permit of a dramatist's adding to or 
modifying the story. 

The jealousy excited among the courtiers by the 
growing influence of Inez and her friends with the 
heir to the throne, had induced them to procure 
the King's consent to her assassination ; and King 
Affonso, counting upon a compliant temper, and 
a long habit of obedience in the Prince, his son, 
ordered her death. She was foully murdered in the 
Convent of Santa Clara, at Coimbra, in the absence 
of her lover. 

The Prince at once took up arms against his 

H 



98 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

father : he ravaged the rich province of the Minho ; 
he laid siege to Oporto, the second city of the empire. 
Upon his father's death, two years afterwards, he 
revenged himself upon those who had compassed the 
murder of the Lady Inez : he is said to have looked 
on while the hearts of the actual murderers were 
torn from their living bodies. His vengeance 
procured him the title of ' The Cruel.' He declared 
himself to have been formally married to Inez de 
Castro. He caused her body to be disinterred, to 
be clad in royal robes, a crown to be placed upon 
her head, and homage to be done to her as to a 
queen. Her bier was carried at night to the mauso- 
leum which he had prepared for her among the 
kings and queens of Portugal, in the great Cistercian 
Abbey of Alcobaca. The funeral train travelled 
along a road thronged with spectators, each of whom 
held aloft a torch ; so that, in the words of an old 
chronicler, the body of Inez passed along an avenue 
' lined as with all the stars of heaven.' 

Such is the impressive story with which the poet 
had to deal. He might have made his drama more 
picturesque by introducing the whole of the episodes, 
but he chose to regard the dramatic unities so far as 
to end the action with the death of Inez, and its effect 
upon the Infante. The civil war, the solemn declara- 
tion of Inez's title, and the strange scene of her royal 
and midnight obsequies, are not employed by Ferreira. 

The play opens with an address, by Inez de 
Castro, to a chorus or band of Coimbra maidens. 
She bids them rejoice with her in her good fortune ; 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 99 

and then, in a dialogue with her attendant, she 
explains the circumstances of her happiness. The 
Greek form in which Ferreira chose to cast his 
tragedy is apparent at the outset. The concise, epi- 
grammatic, sententious utterances of the speakers, in 
single verses, read almost like a translation from one 
of the tragedies of Euripides. 

Ama. Novos extremos vejo. 
Nas palavras prazer, agoa nos olhos. 
Quern te faz juntamente leda, e triste 1 
Inez. Triste nao pode estar, quern ves alegre. 
Ama. Mistura as vezes a fortuna tudo. 
Inez. Riso, prazer, brandura n'alma tenho. 
Ama. Lagrimas sinaes sao da ma fortuna. 
Inez. Tambem da boa fortuna companbeiras. 
Ama. A dor sao naturaes. 
Inez. E ao prazer doces. 

Ama. Que forga de prazer t'as traz aos olhos ? 
Inez. Vejo meu bem seguro, que receava. 

Attendant. Two opposites in thee I see, 

Joy in thy speech, and in thine eyes are tears. 

What makes thee thus at once both sad and gay % 

Inez. Sad I am not — you see that I am glad. 

Att. Eortune, alas ! can dash our cup of joy. 

Inez. Yet in my soul is nought but gaiety. 

Att. Of evil fortune tears give surest sign. 

Inez. Companions too, sometimes, of happiness. 

Att. To grief more kin. 

Inez. And yet in gladness sweet. 

Att. "What great delight is it that makes thee weep % 

Inez. Good fortune safe, which I had feared unsafe. 

Inez then proceeds to recount how Prince Pedro 
had fallen in love with her ; how, for state reasons, 
he had been compelled to marry Constanza, the 
daughter of the Spanish Duke of Yillena ; how the 
Princess had brought over Inez in her train ; how, 

H 2 



100 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

upon the death of his wife, the Prince had now 
secretly married Inez herself. 

There is usually no part of a play more trying to 
the attention, either of audience or reader, than that 
which contains such information as is necessary to 
the understanding of the plot, and which, by a 
dramatic device, clumsy at the best, one of the 
characters has to impart to another, who may well 
enough be supposed to know it all before. Ferreira 
has, with much art, relieved the tediousness and awk- 
wardness of such a narration by making Inez repre- 
sent dramatically, in a passage of the greatest beauty, 
the conversation which had passed between herself 
and the Prince, when she had foreseen the perils which 
his alliance with her would bring upon them both. 
6 My Lord, 1 says Inez, thus recalling her words : — 

Soam me as crueis vozas (Teste povo, 
Vejo del rey a for^a, e imperio grave 
Armado contra mini, contra a constancia, 
Que em meu amor tegora tens mostrado. 
Nao receo, senhor, que a fe tarn firme 
Queiras quebrar a quern tua alma deste ; 
Mas receo a fortuna, que mais possa 
Com seu furor, que tu com teu amor brando. 

The cruel voices of the nation 
Sound in my ears. I see your father's power 
Armed against me — against the constant faith 
With which you hold to my true love for you. 
It is not that I fear that you should break 
Your plighted troth to her who has your heart ; 
But fate I fear — fate which can compass more, 
Through wrath and hate, than you with love prevent. 

And yet, she gees on to say, if the fates should 
prove too powerful, she would count it kinder of him 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 101 

to kill lier with liis own hand, than to force her to 
root out her love from her heart. He assures her 
that nothing will change his resolve to marry her. 
Still narrating, Inez thus reproduces his words : — 

Nao podera fortuna, nao os homems 
Nao estrellas, nao fados, nao planetas 
Apartar-me de ti por arte, ou forga. 
Nesta tua mao te ponho firme, e fixa 
Minh'alma ; por Iffante te nomeo, 
Do meu amor senhora, e do alto estado, 
Que me espera, e ten nome me faz doce ! 

For neither fortune, nor the power of men, 
The starry influence, nor the fates, shall serve 
By art or force, to tear thee from my arms. 
Here in thy hand I place my heart, and I 
Do name thee wife, princess, queen of my love — 
Queen of the high estate which waits me, which 
Only thy love makes sweet ! 

I think that no one will deny that these passages 
have the true dramatic ring. Ferreira seems to me 
to be speaking, in Castro, with the natural voice of 
human passion. There is none of. the over-elabora- 
tion, the over-thoughtfulness, and the over-subtlety 
with which so many good poets have spoilt their 
dramas for the stage. Such a play as Castro can 
require nothing but good actors to stir an audience, 
and one is not surprised to learn that it has achieved 
great stage success in its own language and in several 
literal foreign versions. 

Throughout the tragedy, the Chorus plays a con- 
siderable part, but has no influence upon the action 
of the piece. I know not whether it was intended 
by Ferreira that the chorus songs should be sung, 



102 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

as in Greece, or that they should simply be recited. 
The one beginning ' Quando amor nasceu ' is a pretty 
lyric, and well adapted for choric singing ; so is the 
one ' Antes cego tyranno ; ' both recounting, in short 
rhymed verses, the triumphs of love over gods and 
kings, with, however, rather commonplace instances 
and reflections, which would hardly . bear serious 
recitation. On the other hand, the grave choric piece, 
cast into the Sapphic metre, in which the dangers 
and troubles of a high estate are contrasted with the 
ease and safety of a middle condition of life, must 
have been intended for recitation alone. The fine 
swing and cadence of these noble stanzas show the 
fitness of the Portuguese language for the highest 
forms of poetry. 

Keys poclerosos, principes, tyrannos ! 
Sobre nos policies vossos pes, pisay-nos ; 
Mas sobre vos esta sempre a fort una : 
Nos livres d'ella. 

Nos altos nmros soam mais os ventos : 
As mais crescidas arvores derribam : 
As mais inchadas vellas no mar rompem : 
Caem mores torres. 

Pompas e ventos, titulos inchados 
Nao dao descanso, nem mais doce sono : 
Antes mais cancam, antes em mais medo 
Poem, e perigo. 

Como se volvem no gra mar as ondas, 
Assi se volvem estes peitos cheios 
E nunca fartos, nunca satisfeitos, 
Nunca seguros. 

Princes and tyrants, absolute and potent ! 
Place on our subject necks your feet to crush us ; 
Yet over you the fates have full dominion : 

We can escape them. 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 103 

The strength of the wind-blast tries the lofty palace ; 
Tall forest trees are overthrown the soonest ; 
Stateliest sails are soonest torn by tempest ; 

Loftiest towers fall. 

The pomp and the empty vanity of titles 

No ease afford, nor make our slumbers sweeter. 

Rather, fatigue, disquietude, and danger 

Bring on their owner. 

As the unceasing waves in midmost ocean 
Turn and return, so do these restless spirits, 
Full, but still hungry, never to be sated : 
Never in surety. 

Like Shakespeare's Clarence, Inez de Castro is 
visited, on the night preceding her assassination, by a 
portentous and terrible vision. She dreams that, in 
a dark wood, she encounters and is attacked by two 
savage wolves, and is by them torn to pieces. 

E eu morria 
Com tanta saudade, 1 que ind'agora 
Parece que a ca tenho : e est'alma triste 
Se m'arraneava tarn forgaclainente, 
Como quern ante tempo assi deixava 
Seu lugar, e deixava para sempre 
(Que este na minha morte era o mor mal) 
A doce vista de quern me ama tanto. 

And I gave up my life 
With a despair that seems still present now, 
And thus my soul did flit, against my will, 
As if untimely snatched, in that I left 
(This in death's pain was still death's chiefest smart) 
The sweet aspect of him who loved so well. 

In the scene immediately succeeding, the Chorus 

1 The word saudade, the intense regret and longing for a 
thing past and gone, has no equivalent that I know of in any 
European language. 



104 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

is again brought upon the stage, to declare to Inez 
her approaching doom. Nothing can be more im- 
pressive, and certainly few situations in the less con- 
ventional drama of later days could surpass in stage 
effect, the startling force and weight of the words in 
which, in answer to Inez's questioning as to the 
tidings they have to give her, the Chorus answers, 
4 He tua morte ' — 'It is thy death/ A long and 
highly wrought dialogue occurs, where Inez pleads 
her cause before the King himself, in the presence of 
his councillors, and he, in spite of their advice to the 
contrary, consents to let her live. In her absence, 
however, he again yields a reluctant and wavering 
assent to their solicitations. The perpetration of the 
murder of Inez is announced on the stage, in a solemn 
dirge, by the Chorus, who use the privilege of ancient 
choric song to foresee and foretell the calamities 
which Inez's death will produce. The fifth act is 
obviously incomplete. It consists entirely of a dia- 
logue between the Infante and a messenger who 
brings him the news of his mistress's assassination. 
With the expression of his great horror and grief, the 
tragedy ends by his declaration of his resolve to 
revenge his loss in the most complete and terrible 
manner. 

It will be seen, from the foregoing sketch and 
quotations, that Castro is entirely a tragedy of un- 
mixed and highly wrought passion. Minor incidents, 
which might easily have been introduced, seem 
purposely to have been rejected. The intensity of 
Inez's agony and despair, of the Prince's grief and 



THE PORTUGUESE RENAISSANCE. 105 

rage, of the cruelty and selfishness of the courtiers, 
are unrelieved by any elements of variety or contrast, 
and modified by no subordinate emotion. 

That human actions are ever guided by such 
absolute singleness of motive as is imputed to the 
dramatis personce in tragedies of the classic type, is, 
we know, not the case ; and for this reason we may 
presume it was that the Greek playwrights made the 
impelling influence of the Fates a principal circum- 
stance in their tragedies — knowing that, otherwise, 
the acute audiences of ancient Greece would fail to 
recognise any resemblance whatever between the 
actions of tragic characters and those of ordinary 
human beings. Ferreira has not ventured upon any 
such theory of Fatalism, and the consequence is that, 
taken as a whole, his tragedy as a reading play utterly 
fails in satisfying us that it is a true drama — that it is 
a true representation of the motives and the passions, 
the deeds and the talk, of actual men and women. 
As a literary work, however, and for the purposes 
of the theatre, his tragedy is excellent. Depending 
upon a continued use of declamatory eloquence, his 
language is never once exaggerated, and the senti- 
ments of the various characters, if they are sustained 
in a somewhat monotonous key, are never either 
unnatural or ignoble ; but as a work of general human 
interest for modern readers it fails entirely, from the 
very nature of its scope and conception. 

The two great poets whose works I have reviewed 
begin a period which is the most glorious in Portu- 
guese literature. This Augustan age culminated in 



106 



PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 



the Lusiads of Camoens, whose genius would almost 
seem to have blinded foreign students of his country's 
literature to the merits of his precursors and his con- 
temporaries. Among these, Miranda and Ferreira — - 
the Chaucer and Dry den of Portugal — hold the 
highest place ; men of the most original genius, 
whose great reputations are acknowledged, while 
their lives and their works are all but forgotten, even 
in the country of their birth : — 

lis meurent, et le monde n'en connait que les nonis. 




CLOISTERS OF BEL.EM CONVENT : RENAISSANCE TERTOD. 



107 



CHAPTER IV. 

MODERN PORTUGAL: COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT. 

Most travellers to Portugal land at Lisbon and dine 
at the table d'hote of one of the three or four princi- 
pal hotels of that sunny capital. I appeal to the 
majority of persons so landing and dining, if they 
have not heard- at their very first dinner something 
equivalent to the following remark : ' Portugal is a 
country a hundred and fifty years behind the rest 
of the world.' I have myself heard and read this 
exact chronological comparison very often. I have 
heard it made when I was a new comer, and too 
ignorant to dispute it ; and since then I have heard 
the proposition laid down again and again, when I was 
too sure of the ignorance of the speaker to pay any 
attention to him. 

Of course it is a foolish and ignorant error, and 
deserves to be shown to be so. First, what is the rest 
of the world that Portugal has not caught up by a 
century and a half? It is Europe, presumably, for 
of course no nation in the Eastern world is in the race 
even now with the little Western kingdom ; and again, 
we must leave out of comparison those sinks of poli- 
tical iniquity, the upstart republics of South and 



108 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

Central America. The great and respectable parvenu 
of North America has no past, no real history apart 
from that of the mother country, and must therefore 
be excluded from comparison. Then, too, ' the rest 
of the world ' must exclude the Turkey and Eussia 
of to-day, for in Portugal at least there is free 
thought and free speech, equal justice, and neither the 
bastinado nor the whip, neither impalement, nor 
pachas, nor sentinel house porters, nor Siberia, nor 
the Sultan, nor the Czar. The comparison, too, must 
exclude even modern Italy, where, besides the foul 
Camorra plague and the religious feud, half the 
land is still cursed with brigandage ; and Spain, 
which is to the full as bad with bigots and brig- 
ands ; and Greece, which is more thief-ridden than 
either. 

So the charge dwindles down to this, that the 
Portuguese nation is only behindhand in civilisation 
to the few nations of Western Europe who, in respect 
of progress, and civilization, and humanization, are, 
and long have been, the very salt of the earth ; say 
Germany, France, and Great Britain, the four small 
constitutional Governments of the North, and Switzer- 
land, whose peculiar institutions and circumstances 
make comparison not possible. 

Now, Portugal is seriously accused of being a 
hundred and fifty years behind these favoured nations 
in all that distinguishes a crowd of savages from a 
coherent nation of thinking men. Let us see how 
laughably unjust the statement is. 

Let us take France, and even less than a hundred 



COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT. 109 

and fifty years will bring us into the company of 
Louis XV. and Madame de Pompadour, a demoralised 
Court and a down-trodden people — poor and misery- 
stricken, enslaved by superstition, ignorance, and the 
tyranny of priest and noble. What is there in all 
this to compare with modern Portugal ? A century 
and a half ago in Germany, to take no worse a part 
of it than Prussia, we have that most unmitigated and 
grotesque of all royal and domestic tyrants, the father 
of the great Frederick, and a people not unwilling or 
unworthy to be governed by such a wretch. England 
at the beginning of the eighteenth century we know 
all about ; and if anyone will seriously contend that 
a minister as corrupt as Walpole could govern in 
modern Portugal for a day, he must know very little 
of government in that country. If he supposes that 
a country like our own under the First or Second 
George, in which one great party was openly treason- 
able to the Throne and the Constitution, in which 
armed rebellion was ready to break out at a hint 
from a neighbouring sovereign, and of which one 
great division was enslaved and terrorised by political 
and religious disabilities, and another division so law- 
less that the writs of the King's Law Courts would not 
run through it — if any man can draw a parallel 
between such a country and the Portugal of to-day, 
he is either too ignorant to be heard at all, or his 
statement is, as polite psychologists who hesitate over 
a stronger term, say — ' an act of imperfect cerebra- 
tion.' 

The amiable poet who moralised to the effect that 



110 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

but a small ingredient in the mass of human suffering 
was that part which 

Laws or kings can cause or cure, 

never perhaps went very deeply into the ethics of 
tyranny. Let tyrannical kings and laws, he argued, 
do their worst, they must at the last leave ' our 
reason, our faith, and our conscience ' to us. I should 
be very sorry, for my own part, to try the experiment 
in Poland or in Turkey ; but, be this as it may, Gold- 
smith overlooked, I think, the suffering caused by 
those meddlesome laws which the stupidity of our 
ancestors imposed, and which that of many contem- 
porary governments still imposes, upon every trans- 
action in the traffic of man with man. 

These are the things that make life bitter to the 
common run of mortals. A man may easily, leading 
the middle course of life, escape ' Luke's iron crown,' 
as the poet puts it, or ' Damien's bed of steel,' but he 
cannot escape the legislation of stupid and tyrannous 
lawgivers. This is a mill designed to grind the weak 
rather than the strong, to take the darnel before the 
wheat, and it grinds, as everyone knows, exceedingly 
small. 

Those who hold to this before-mentioned theory 
of the non-progress of Portugal,' must expect to find 
the fruits of such legislation as common in the country 
as under our First George, when the great majority of 
citizens found nearly everything they could buy made 
dearer to them by the law, and all they had to sell 
made cheaper — daily life turned into one long struggle 
to the poor and unfriended man, that it might be 



COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT. Ill 

sweeter and easier to the rich and the influential ; the 
full dreariness and injustice of the world brought 
home to a poor man at every turn. But this is not so, 
and these evils have passed away as completely in 
modern Portugal as they have in modern England. 

In modern Portugal there are neither the cruel 
criminal laws which disgraced England a far shorter 
time ago than a hundred and fifty years, nor are there 
any irrational municipal laws to help Corporations to 
grow fat at their fellow-burghers' expense, nor any of 
those monstrously foolish ordinances about regretting 
and forestalling which our forefathers believed to be 
wise. No wages are fixed by law in Portugal, and now, 
except for fiscal reasons and fiscal purposes, no com- 
modity of daily life, neither bread, nor oil, nor salt, 
nor meat, nor drink, is to be bought or sold at any 
other than its natural, that is, its cheapest price. Of 
all the many monopolies which once existed in 
Portugal to hinder trade and impoverish the people, 
only two are extant — the one in soap, the other in 
tobacco, and they are for fiscal purposes and may be 
defended. True, protection survives, that easiest 
borne of all tyrannies of the few over the many ; but 
then its fallacies are fallacies invisible not in Portugal 
only, but by a majority of the people and of the 
statesmen of every nation in the world except our own, 
and protection is perhaps fated to die sooner in 
Portugal than elsewhere. Even now, protection in 
Portugal is nothing to what it was in Great Britain 
fifty years ago. 

As to many departments of municipal law, of 



112 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

primary education, of police, as to the laws relating 
to land and the transfer of land, and those which 
affect the succession to property, some reformers 
may think that modern Portugal is ahead of modern 
England. 

In regard to Poor Laws, a man need be neither a 
reformer nor a philosopher to perceive that Portugal 
has legislated with far more wisdom than we have, 
The Portuguese system of relief for the poor may be 
described briefly to be private charity organised and 
centralised, and only occasionally helped by grants in 
aid by the State. Belief is wisely and humanely 
administered, agriculture is not hindered by heavy 
poor rates, thrift and hard labour are not discouraged 
among the workers on the land, nor is a cheerless 
and desolate and melancholy old age prepared for the 
infirm and the poor. 

Apart from all these possible points of comparison 
between Great Britain and Portugal, Portugal pos- 
sesses the inestimable blessing of a codified criminal 
and civil law. 

Of all possible subjects of comparison in modern 
free Portugal, soberly governed as it is, with civil 
and religious peace and tolerance, trade and traffic as 
free as elsewhere on the European continent, life and 
liberty secure, and equality before good and intelli- 
gible laws, I can think of but one point in which Eng- 
land under the first two Georges is not immeasurably 
distanced by Portugal under its present enlightened 
and law-respecting sovereign. That one point is 
— conscription, the terrible blood- tax of every Con- 



COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT. 113 

tinental country, to whose cruelty and burden no 
custom nor length of habit can reconcile the people. 
Often and often have I watched with pity and strong 
indignation the workings of this most damnable system. 
To be sure, conscription seems at present to be a ne- 
cessity to nations of the European continental family. 
Nevertheless, Homo homini hbpus appears a true say- 
ing to an impartial outsider at such times. 

The heart-sickness of deferred hope seems to be 
greatly prolonged by a Portuguese conscription, and 
the risk of a conscript's lot is run even after the fatal 
number is drawn ; for if the man who should answer 
to it is not forthcoming, dies, or falls ill, or escapes, 
or in any way evades his fate, then the drawer of the 
next number is called upon, and failing him, the next 
and the next again, so that hardly any strong and 
active Portuguese boy past conscript's age can feel 
comfortably safe. No cottage is secure from the 
pain of separation. Parents have to meet another 
evil besides their children's death or desertion of 
them ; lovers, the pang of another cross besides the 
old and common one of inconstancy. 

It is good to consider this matter in all iis bear- 
ings, for we in England may not perhaps always be free 
from the curse of a conscription: indeed, only a few 
weeks ago we were told in a leading weekly paper that 
we must come to it in time. The devil is, we know, 
not coal-black, nor even conscription quite so abomin- 
able an institution but that something may be said for 
it. To be sure, it decimates a country in a fashion, 
robs industry of many strong arms, and causes infinite 

I 



114 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

social and domestic harm and heart-burning. Never- 
theless, a large conscripted army, passed quickly 
through the ranks and returned to civil life before it 
has lost the taste for civilian hard work, is a school 
of manners. In the United States, manners were 
said to be noticeably better after the civil war than 
the very bad ones which prevailed before. Now, 
good manners and respect for authority are, within 
proper limits, undoubtedly sources of strength to a 
man and to a nation, and their existence in Portugal 
is, I think, partly traceable to military service. 

Most conscriptions spare married men, and a 
young man consequently has a temptation to marry 
which never entered into the head of the narrow- 
minded Malthus. The patriotism, therefore, which, 
like Parson Primrose's, holds that ' the honest man 
who marries and brings up a large family does the 
State more service than he who continues single and 
only talks of population,' may find something to 
approve even in a conscription. A family is a good 
investment for a man who cannot afford to pay forty 
or fifty pounds for a substitute, and the man who 
dislikes drill, or hates cold steel and gunpowder, 
marries a wife to insure himself against what he con- 
siders a worse fate. 

Perhaps statistics would not bear out the state- 
ment that these prudential marriages are frequent. 
I only know that it is a matter of common jest that 
they happen. I heard it first, I remember, some 
years ago from a man who was carrying my fishing- 
basket along a trout stream in the province of Beira. 



COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT. 115 

We had passed a village where the annual drawing 
was taking place. As my companion told me of this 
mode of escape from the horrors of war, I thought of 
the cynical old Scotch proverb — ' Next to nae wife a 
gude wife is best.' There are few people so quick to 
take in a joke as the Portuguese. I translated the 
proverb for his benefit. ' I know the country,' I said, 
' where the people have this for a saying.' He 
laughed. ' Perhaps the proverb is a true enough one,' 
he said ; ' but is there any balloting for soldiers in 
that country ? ' x 

Now, the question may occur to the reader — it has 
often occurred to the writer — how is it that a coun- 
try where good government has been so backward in 
coming (for it does not date further back than the 
establishment of liberal institutions in 1833) should 
yet be so advanced in all the arts of social and 
political life ; should not only enjoy a good constitu- 
tion — which is a small matter (for good constitutions 
are as common as thistles), but statesmen honest 
enough and dexterous enough to make good use of 
it — which is a great matter? How is it that a coun- 
try too limited in population to have a periodical 
press of any power, and where, in point of fact, the 
press is not very powerful for gpod or evil, where the 
debates in Parliament, the speeches of politicians, and 
the proceedings of the law courts are seldom or never 
reported, where the higher culture, literary or scien- 

1 The conscription law in Portugal is at present administered 
very strictly. Marriage is now no ' set off,' and when the final 
lot is drawn no substitute is accepted. 

i 2 



116 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW, 

tific, does not abound ; where, in short, there seem 
to be absolutely none of those levers which we at 
home believe to be the only ones to make the intellect 
of the masses stir — how is it that among the Portu- 
guese, a sanguine Southern race, there is so keen an 
appreciation of the benefits of wise and sober ad- 
ministration ? There is floating in every class of this 
country, from the highest to the lowest, a mass of 
sound and tolerant doctrine, political, social, and 
religious — sound and tolerant from the point of view 
of any Frenchman, Englishman, or American of 
liberal and moderate views. How is this ? Whence 
does this doctrine come, and how does it find admit- 
tance with all entrance thus seemingly shut out ? 

I believe the answer to all this to be, first, that 
the Portuguese race is a blend of nationalities which 
time has welded almost into homogeneity. There is, 
therefore, no clash of race with race, and there is no 
faith feud, nor much opposition of interests between 
class and class, for the country is still chiefly, and 
should, perhaps, be entirely agricultural. Then there 
is a free constitutional government ; there is liberty of 
meeting, of printing, and, above all, of talking ; ideas 
are as free in free Portugal as they necessarily are in 
bondage and subjection in despotic Eussia. This 
being so, all the new doctrine and all the true 
doctrine of the whole world percolates as quickly 
through every stratum of Portuguese society as the 
drops of rain from heaven sink down to the plant- 
roots in a well tilled soil. There is, moreover, less 
need of a great periodical press, such as ours or the 



COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT. 117 

American, because the Portuguese are a talkative and 
a sociable race. Ideas come to them not so much 
on a printed page as by word of mouth. 

Lastly, to explain the advancement of political 
intelligence in Portugal, it must not be forgotten who 
the Portuguese people are. They are, as I have said, 
a race with a lineage happily blended of the strength 
of the North and the more subtle genius of the South. 
A race possessing great and rare qualities, dormant 
for a time, indeed, and temporarily debased by the 
corruption which goes with tyranny, but whose quick 
revival under the kindly influences of freedom is one 
of the marvels of modern history. It is a race which 
has at all times been marked by a rare union of 
enthusiasm and sobriety, and whose restricted numbers 
only have stood in the way of its predominant power 
and influence among nations ; which, in spite of its 
numerical insignificance, has conquered and settled 
continents, crossed unknown seas, and carried its faith 
and language far and wide over the more distant 
regions of the earth. What wonder is it that men 
loyal enough to each other, steadfast enough in their 
principles, and high enough and bold enough to 
achieve these great things, should, the chance given 
them, appreciate at once the wisdom and the benefits 
of free government, and fall into the way and practice 
of it forthwith ? 

Though, as I have said, agriculture is still the 
prevailing pursuit of the Portuguese, country life, as 
we in England understand it, is a thing little known 



118 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

in Portugal. The reason, of course, is to be found in 
the tenure of land, as I shall further on take occasion 
to explain. Were it chiefly sublet on leases, as with 
us, the Portuguese country gentleman would doubt- 
less be dotted over the land, to collect and lower his 
rents, patronise his tenants, to hunt, shoot, fish, grow 
his geraniums, turnips, orchids, or conifers, as his 
taste might dictate, or to cultivate that precarious 
little crop of politics which is all that the ballot and 
extended suffrage have left to our country gentleman 
in this domain. The Portuguese squire, if he existed, 
would no doubt, like his English representative, play 
at whist with his parson and at justice with his 
neighbouring squires, do the equivalent of reading 
his ' Times ' and his 4 Punch,' of subscribing to 
Mudie's, and, in short, he would aspire to that 
cultivated ease and dignity which distinguish the 
country squire from the country ploughman. 

In Portugal there is either yeoman tenure, where 
the farmer is his own landlord, or communal, where 
the lordship is impersonal ; in districts where there 
are large estates and leased farms, the estates are of 
huge size, and lie for the most part in districts where 
the land is poor and mountainous, or in malarious 
plain country, with no temptation to the owner to 
settle. The landlord's work is therefore deputed to 
an agent, and the former lives in one of the great 
cities. The Portuguese never play at country life as 
our people are fond of doing — that is, they do not 
betake themselves to the country and lead a con- 
tinuous existence there, without having real duties or 



COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT. 119 

interests in the land. I think they are in the right, 
and that to be secluded in a dull country neighbour- 
hood, as English families seem to like to doom them- 
selves to be, without ties or any contact with their 
fellow-beings, with no occupations but the visits from, 
or the calls upon, distant neighbours, is the surest of 
all methods of dulling the social faculties, and of 
slipping back in the race towards culture and the 
higher education. 

The Portuguese, as a rale, care not a straw for 
culture and the higher education, but they hate seclu- 
sion of this kind. There is absolutely no such thing 
as the dull continuous vegetation of English country 
life — bad even for the inertness of advancing age ; 
but for young people and for girls especially, who 
cannot escape to school or college like their brothers, 
simply stupid and abominable. In Portugal there 
are no 4 Marianas ' in moated granges. 

For all this, there are plenty of country houses, 
and very good and pleasant ones, only they are not 
much lived in. A certain well known family in Por- 
tugal — one with an infinite number of cousins, uncles, 
and collateral relatives of all degrees — boasts that a 
member of it can pass on horseback from the extreme 
north to the extreme south of the kingdom, and sleep 
every night of his journey in a kinsman's house. I 
questioned one of the family on this point, and he 
corroborated the statement, showing me even on a 
map how one of his parentage might (' though with 
some small parenthesis between ') travel through the 
country in this pleasant fashion, and without, as it 



120 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

were, once leaving the family circle. I think I 
recollect that the chain of these convenient lodgings 
terminated at the frontiers of Algarve, the most 
southerly province; but then Algarve is, in some 
sort, a kingdom of itself, over which the Portuguese 
monarch rules with some separation of jurisdiction — 
' Rex Port, et Algarh! is the legend on coins — so that 
the boast that Portugal can be traversed by a man 
who should never sleep but under a kinsman's roof is 
still justified. 

Now, the Portuguese gentleman's ideal of a country 
house is the old Eoman one of a villa, and his residence 
in it a villeggiatura, after the modern Italian fashion 
— a brief holiday time in the hot season, a voluntary 
rustication by people whose love of country life is 
shown by the fact of their literature containing more 
good pastoral poetry than that of any European 
nation. But as no sane and active-minded man can 
read more than a very limited amount of pastoral 
poetry, so no Portuguese cares to play at living a 
more than very brief pastoral existence. He and his 
family leave town for a month or two in August, or 
September, or October, the worst and dullest season 
in cities, the busiest and most cheerful in the country ; 
for then is the time of vintage and maize harvest, 
and most of the fruits of trees are being garnered, 
and then is the best season to shoot quail and hare 
and the red-legged partridge. 

There is, of course, every variety of size and pre-' 
tentiousness in the houses used for the villeggiatura 
in Portugal ; but almost invariably for grounds the 



COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT. 121 

dwelling has round it the vineyards, orange and olive 
groves, and the cornfields of a farm. Generally the 
farm with its farmstead is an appanage of the villa ; 
the farmer, its owner's tenant or his bailiff. When the 
landlord and employer runs down, he and his wife 
and children have plenty to occupy and amuse them- 
selves with. The landlord has his live stock and 
buildings, his walls and his vine trellises to examine, 
his orchards to inspect^ and, above all, the condition 
of the water-works to see to, that first necessity in 
Southern farm economy. Mostly it is the Nora, the 
old fashioned water-wheel, worked by oxen turning 
in a circular space overshadowed by vines. The 
power is conveyed to an endless chain, set a foot apart 
with buckets, which dip into the well and fetch up 
the water from the depths, spilling half of it by the 
way, it is true, but still making up a plentiful rill, 
pleasant to listen to and to see flowing off to the 
thirsty land. On the threshing-floor are already the 
huge piles of golden red maize cobs, lying ready for 
the master's eye to assess, and the lesser heaps of more 
precious kidney beans, white, brown, or mottled. The 
great gourds and water melons are still in the fields 
where they have grown, getting their last mellowing 
touches of colour from the autumnal sun-rays. 

It is a delightful time for all the family too. The 
children play at water-works, and swim oranges in 
the runlets of water flowing from the Nora, look out 
the sweetest bunches of grapes, or play at hide-and- 
seek in the rank growth of vegetation which the 
summer sun has raised. The girls saunter in the 



122 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

flower garden, with its old fashioned box-edged paths 
and beds well shaded by camellias and Tangerine 
orange trees, and filled full with flowering plants of 
the older fashion, the asters, the balsam, heliotrope, 
and scented verbena, cock's-combs, geraniums, blue 
and scarlet salvias, dahlias and fuchsias of the more 
primitive kinds, chrysanthemums, and great bushes of 
the yellow-flowered sedum ; — all deplorable enough 
in the eyes of any modern gardener, but gay and 
bright and charming from sheer force of unchecked 
luxuriance. 

The house is a very plain one ; a square building, 
generally white-washed inside and out, with broad 
overhanging eaves painted with vermilion under- 
neath. Many of these houses have one large central 
room with a number of little cells for bedrooms, open- 
ing out on three sides. This central room, uncarpeted 
and furnished with a dozen or two of rickety chairs 
and a large deal table, is hung with monstrously bad 
framed prints — the Battle of the Nile, the ' Saucy 
Arethusa,' a series showing the life and death of Pope 
Pius VII., the Heroism of Egaz Moniz, the Loves of 
Inez de Castro, or the legendary Vision of King 
AfFonso Henri quez. Here the family meet and take 
their meals. An ox-cart or two full of extra furniture 
is sent from the town house, and serves well enough 
to make the family as comfortable as they care to be 
on their two months' picnic. 

Such is the villeggiatura of the middle classes not 
over-burdened with this world's goods. Among the 
country houses of wealthier people, who have been 



COUNTEY LIFE AND SPORT. 123 

fortunate enough to buy or inherit villas of the more 
luxurious kind, are some magnificent and singularly 
hideous modern dwellings, with huge earthenware 
greyhounds, or wild boars, keeping guard over preten- 
tious gateways, painted glass in the windows, and 
enormous balls of silvered tin perched on portentous 
cupolas on the house top, buildings inviting the wrath 
of Heaven by every enormity of bad taste— a style of 
architecture defying all recognised canons of art, 
and gardens which would be as unpleasant as the 
houses but that in this kindly chmate Nature takes 
these matters into her own hands, ' invading the 
quincunx ' with, the luxuriance of her plant growth, 
violating the ' trim parterre ' most satisfactorily, and 
making an agreeable tangle and wilderness of the 

DC O 

most correct design. 

There are, however, in Portugal, villa dwellings 
and gardens of the richer and more luxurious sort, of 
an older and better fashion than this. One such is 
in my memory as I write. A stately house of plain, 
solid architecture, with a walled courtyard in front, 
wherein old orange trees overshadow the rippling 
surface of a stone-formed tank, into which descends 
a plentiful waterfall from a carved dolphin's head. 

Inside, the wood-carved wreaths and trophies on 
the stairs and the doorways point to the period which 
connoisseurs know as ' Louis Seize,' and in spite of 
the great secular trees about the grounds, the house, 
I know, is no older than the reign of that monarch. 
This house is always maintained in good residential 
condition, fully furnished, and with a small staff of 



124 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

servants in occupation the whole year round. There 
are corridors hung with passably good oil pictures ; 
great china cupboards, crammed full of ware 
purchased seemingly at all periods within the last 
hundred years, chiefly the handsome but compara- 
tively worthless Oriental ware of seventy or eighty 
years ago ; and, curious to note, next in abundance 
to this are the wares of our own fabriques — Crown 
Derby in great quantity and richness, Wedgwood, 
Worcester, Leeds, and even Bow and Chelsea. 1 

There is a handsome private chapel on the ground 
floor, dedicated to St. Anthony, large enough to hold 
the whole parish on the Saint's holiday, and here 
mass is said every Sunday and Saint's day through- 
out the year. In this chapel, as in almost every 
private chapel I ever saw in Spain or Portugal, is 
that curious arrangement by which the ladies of the 
house can join in the service without mingling with 
the crowd of worshippers on the floor. A grated 
window, like the Ladies' Gallery in the House of 
Lords, about half way up the wall, opens into one of 
the rooms of the house, and the ladies and children 
sitting there can open their windows and see and 
take part in, themselves unseen, all that goes on in 
the chapel. It is church -going made very easy. I 
do not know whether the practice is a remnant of 
old Moorish notions of women's seclusion, or comes 

1 The long existing commercial relations between Portugal' 
and Great Britain growing out of the port wine trade are the 
cause why more last-century English porcelain and earthenware is 
to be found in Portugal than elsewhere in Europe. 



COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT. 125 - 

merely from fineness and a liking to be exclusive. 
One may suppose it had its origin in the old notions, 
and is kept up from habit and from convenience. 

As in the case of the smaller villas, the house is 
connected with a farm, and the grounds and garden 
mingle in the same pleasant fashion with the appur- 
tenances of the farmstead. A long, straight, over- 
arching avenue of camellia and Seville orange trees 
terminates in a broad, paved threshing-floor. In a 
little dell below the house, under a dense shadow of 
fig and loquat trees, is the huge water-wheel, worked 
by six oxen, and raising a little river from the depths 
below. The terraced fields, the orange and olive groves 
and the orchards, are all surrounded by broad walks 
overshadowed by a heavy pleached trellis supporting 
vines, and here in the hottest summer's day is cool 
walking in the grey half- shadow of the greenery 
overhead. Runlets of water course along in stone 
channels by the side of every path and roadway, and 
the murmur of running water — a sound of which the 
ear never tires in the South — is heard everywhere 
and always. 

The well-shaded garden is laid out in the stately 
Italian fashion ; with carved stone-work in its 
terraced and balustraded walks, its flights of broad 
steps, and its fountains and gold-fish ponds ; and here, 
more than anywhere, the water-threads and jets and 
cascades fall and rise and splash with most refreshing 
murmuring. There is nothing the Portuguese so 
much delight in as this flow of ever-moving water 
cooling the air, and associated with the very idea of 



126 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

fertility and green luxuriance. Camoens, in his great 
epic, describing the enchanted Venus Island, mentions 
how there flows on in it for ever, among the hollow 
stones of the flower-enamelled hillside, 

A sonorosa lympha fugitiva, 

and I rather doubt if the expressive beauty of this 

line would fully come home to anyone but a dweller 

under some such summer sky as that of Portugal. 

Camoens' description of the miraculous island, fine as 

it is, is little more than an accurate picture of many 

a bit of cultivated pastoral scenery in this country, 

and I am in truth strongly reminded of the whole 

passage in recalling the surroundings of the very 

house I am speaking of. Here, behind the house, are 

the green, turf-clothed hills, with the water welling 

everywhere, and keeping the vegetation lush and 

green. Here, too, is the wealth of fruit trees : — 

Mil arvores estao ao ceu subindo 

Com pomos odoriferos e bellos : 

A larangeira tern no fruto lindo 

A cor que tinha Daphne nos cabellos : 

Encosta-se no chao -, que esta cahindo, 

A cidreira co' os pezos amarellos : 

Os formosos limoes alii cheirando. 

Trees manifold here lift their branches tall, 
Fruit-laden, fragrant, exquisite and rare : 
T^he orange tree with bright-hued golden ball, 
Passing the golden hues of Daphne's hair, 
Citrons with weight of yellow-coated fruit 



And lemons odorous 



It is a far more concrete piece of description than' 
the Italian poet gives us of Armida's magic garden, 
but not the less impressive ; the nymphs are very 



COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT. 127 

real personages indeed in the Portuguese epic, and 
all the sights and sounds of nature have a most bodily 
presentment : the very scent of the flowers and savour 
of the fruit are exactly set forth. 

Camoens, however, in truth, had not on his palette 
all the colours which, had he written in this age, he 
would have used in making his picture of a Portuguese 
landscape full and complete. In the three hundred 
years which have elapsed since the ' Lusiads ' were 
written, and partly in consequence of the great deeds 
of prowess on which the poem is founded, Portugal 
has become the emporium of a wealth of plant form, 
chiefly in fruit and forest trees, from every quarter 
of the globe. Camellias from Japan have long been 
the chief ornament of every garden, growing to the 
size of apple trees in England. The loquat from 
China surpasses as a giver of shade the fig itself — 
the old-world type of shade-giving trees ; in Novem- 
ber it fills the air with the sweet scent of its blossoms, 
and ripens its refreshing yellow fruit in early summer. 
The gum trees of Australia, and especially the blue 
gum [Eucalyptus globulus^ the fever tree), have 
positively altered the aspect of the more inhabited 
parts of the country within the last twenty years ; so 
that a modern painter, to make a characteristic land- 
scape, must now needs introduce into his picture this 
species of gum tree, with its slender, polished trunk, 
its upright branch-growth against the sky line, and 
its long drooping leaves, rich in winter time with a 
mellow splendour of russet red, and yellow. 

Again, there is the Bella Sombra, a huge forest 



128 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

tree from Brazil, which lias taken most kindly to 
Portuguese soil and climate ; bnt finest of the im- 
ported trees is the great-flowered magnolia from 
Carolina and Central America — a forest giant in its 
native lands, and, where it finds a damp and congenial 
soil, nothing less in size in this country. The age of 
the very oldest magnolia in Portugal cannot exceed a 
hundred and twenty years, and yet already some of 
them tower to a height exceeding that of the tallest 
English oak tree, rearing aloft huge clouds of shin- 
ing, laurel-like leafage, starred here and there in 
spring and summer time with their great white and 
scented blossoms. 

All these trees, together with many conifers from 
the highlands of Brazil and the slopes of the 
Himalayas, and countless shrubs, are going far to 
make of Portugal a marvel for variety of rapid and 
luxuriant growth in the eyes of arboriculturists from 
our own country, who count the years' growth of their 
exotic conifers by inches and fractions of inches. 

Now, for all these arboreal varieties of foreign ex- 
traction — these imported Circassian brides — which are 
embellishing the native stock of trees, and reforming 
the Portuguese pleasure woods and orchards, to my 
thinking they are but material beauties at the best ; 
and the associations connected with some of the older 
denizens of the garden and orchard, hallowed by time 
and ancient culture, have in them some deeper and 
more subtle beauty than the merely sensuous one of 
stately growth and form, size, fine massing of light 
and shade, and so forth. To say nothing of the 



COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT. 129 

orange tree and its associations — as to which, indeed, 
travellers have not too greatly foreborne their rhetoric 
—there is the olive tree, which travellers have 
certainly not over-praised, or, for the matter of that, 
praised at all. In truth, I do not remember ever 
hearing, from tourist or traveller, a good word for the 
olive tree, with its stunted growth, its insignificant 
leaves and flowers and fruit, its ashy, or, rather, lead- 
coloured foliage. Yet how is it that the old poets of 
Greece have sung its praises with raptures exceeding, 
I think, what they have bestowed upon any other gift 
of nature ? 

I am reminded, as I write, of the famous chorus 
in the play of Sophocles, in which the poet, recounting 
in glowing words all the beauties and advantages of 
the Attic land — its fruits, its flowers, its sacred groves, 
its full and flowing streams ; and again, its breed of 
horses and its seas, but, above all, the noble race of 
inhabitants apt and able tp tame the one and cross 
the other — culminates his enthusiasm in his praise 
(which I imagine has often seemed a most ridiculous 
anti-climax to northern Europeans) of that gift of the 
protecting Deity, the 'grey-green olive tree.' Is it 
that with a surer aesthetic perception than we moderns 
possess, these old poets overlooked the homely aspect of 
the actual tree, and idealized it ? That they saw in it 
the oil-producer, the giver of that which — to dwellers 
in a country like Attica, who drew most of their suste- 
nance from the orchard and from the forest, and from 
the waters of the neighbouring seas — was a boon of in- 
estimable value, a gift with a clear divinity about it ? 

K 



130 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

Doubtless there is something of gratitude in the 
poets' songs of praise ; but they misapprehend greatly 
who suppose that this tree of great price is not also 
one of great and peculiar loveliness. To know its 
true beauty we must see it, not as it is looked upon 
by winter-sojourning travellers, such as most English- 
men are who have seen and probably despised the 
olive — not in the chill and heavy atmosphere of the 
winter season, or even under the light-blue skies of 
an Italian or Peninsular late autumn or early spring, 
but in the full glory of summer tide, when the air is 
clear and bright as a diamond, the sharply defined 
shadow of hill and rock rosy in its depth, and the sea 
and sky purple in the intensity of their blue. Then is 
the olive tree transformed, illuminated, by the blaze of 
sun-rays, till it looks to be an ethereal kind of growth, 
as of something in an enchanted land ; the dull leaden 
leaves glow now all the day long with a rare silvery 
hue, and the sunset lights up a golden haze upon 
them. Then one at last begins to understand the 
enthusiasm of the old poets ; for an Athenian, at such 
times as these, looking on a grove of olive trees, 
might swear by the great Pallas Athene, the giver of 
them, that nothing more rare and exquisite in beauty 
grew in all the Southern land. 

Though I trust that no one who knows me at all 
well, either in private or in public and literary life, 
will think so ill of me as to imagine that I could 
venture to put upon paper a full and particular 
account of so everyday an occurrence as a sunset, yet 



COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT. 131 

I must take leave to say, in justice to the country 
and to those aspects of it which are chiefly the sub- 
ject of this chapter, that a Portuguese sunset is a re- 
markably grand thing. 

I was lately reading an interesting travel-book 
upon Norway, and was disturbed to find that the very 
capable author recurs again and again to the beauty 
of the Norwegian sunsets. This, as cautious moralists 
say, ' is not as it should be ; ' every sunset everywhere, 
if there be but a single cloud on the western horizon, 
is a beautiful spectacle, but the spectacle in Norway 
is a prolonged, a monotonous, and a not very brilliant 
affair. We have much better sunsets at home in 
England ; and, as we travel south, the setting of the 
lamp of day is attended by more and more of glorious 
circumstance, till we come toq near the equator, 
when the sun dives so quickly beneath the usually 
cloudless horizon that there is no time for a serious 
sunset, and the ' sudden glory ' of it is come and 
gone before the aesthetic observer has time to col- 
lect his admiration into focus. Humboldt, if I 
recollect rightly, makes the limits of the grandest 
sunsets in the Northern Hemisphere to extend from 
lat. 30° to 42°. Portugal is well included in this 
zone. 

Other conditions, meteorological ones chiefly, 
besides latitude go to the making of good sunsets ; a 
mountainous region, a variable chmate, and probably 
some electric conditions at which we can only guess. 
One might imagine that the level plains of ocean 
would supply all the necessary conditions of fine sun- 

K 2 



132 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

sets ; but it is not so, — sea sunsets as a rule lack 
variety. All travellers by sea will agree with me. 
Only once do I remember an ocean sunset that was 
so immeasurably grander than any other I ever saw 
that it is impossible to lose the memory of it ; but 
even here, land had as much as water to do with it, 
and it was nearly within the limits of Humboldt's 
zone. 

We happened to be sailing at evening time in the 
month of October unusually near the cliffs of the 
Spanish Finisterre, and a great vivid cloud-picture was 
suddenly spread all around us — the clouds all purple 
and saffron in the far east, on a background of pale 
citron, brightening towards the west through every 
degree of the prismatic scale, and turning at last to a 
fiery effulgence as they neared the sun's throne in the 
western sky. The whole body of clouds moved slowly 
through the great airy amphitheatre, and all the 
broad welkin was reflected again on the glassy surface 
of sea fluctuating in slow and swelling masses ; while 
away coastward were upreared the tall cliffs of Finis- 
terre, rosy red in the dying light of day : a spectacle 
to awe a materialist. It is mortifying to think how 
difficult it is to maintain one's aesthetic enthusiasm 
at a high pitch for any time ; for while we looked 
there came to our ears on the calm evening air the 
sound of soft music, the instrument a banjo in the 
forecastle played by our negro cook, the air a ' break- 
down.' Presently came the steward respectfully to 
remind us that tea was ready in the saloon. How 
faithful a servant is memory at times ! I remember 



COUNTRY LIFE AND SPOKT. 133 

that, seeing us a little loth to leave the deck, he sought 
to tempt us down with the observation that there 
were potted lobster and pickled salmon on the table, 
and we went below, leaving the glorious firmament 
of heaven to itself, while the air upon the banjo 
changed to 'Way down upon the Suwannee River.' 

No one will accuse Portuguese country gentle- 
men of an over-sentimental admiration of sunsets ; 
their sentimentality, where it exists, seldom runs in an 
aesthetic direction ; and for plain, practical men who 
can fill their heads and hands with thoughts and work 
of other kinds, they perhaps do well to leave the less 
concrete aspects of nature alone. They certainly do 
not come down into the country to dazzle their eyes 
with the rising and setting sun. Art, literature, 
science, in Portugal are for the very few alone, and 
the high culture which undoubtedly pervades almost 
every class in the community is purely social culture, 
the not too easy or too common art of maintaining 
pleasant relations with superiors, with inferiors, and 
with equals. 

So when the Portuguese gentleman comes for his 
annual holiday to the country, he looks to his garden, 
his cellar, his granaries, the warrens, and the woods 
wherewith to fill his mind. As a rule he brings no 
new books to beguile his leisure or widen his mental 
horizon, he never buys pictures, he seldom collects 
rare prints or art objects ; old china, French enamels, 
Italian majolica, or German ivories are mysteries to 
him, and their accumulation a childish extravagance. 



134 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

He will keep them, if he has inherited them, as con- 
venient house furniture, and he may buy now and 
then an old Indian or Japanese cabinet for the same 
useful purpose ; but he would greatly prefer a modern 
one of buhl or ormolu fresh from a Paris workshop, 
and bright with all the hideous crudity of its newness. 
Plate he likes to acquire, and the fine old Portuguese 
silver repousse work of two hundred years ago finds 
a ready sale in the country ; but he would like it 
infinitely better if it bore the hall mark of George 
IY.'s reign, and was of the gorgeous style and massive 
construction peculiar to the period of that gorgeous 
and massive sovereign. 

He loves the chase, but never owned an expensive 
central-fire gun by a good London or Paris maker. 
Not many years ago, he used nothing better than a 
long, single-barrelled gun of great antiquity ; making, 
however, most excellent practice with it upon red- 
legged partridges and quail. Now he shoots quite as 
straight with a cheap Belgian double-barrelled piece, 
which an Englishman would not put into the hands 
of his under-keeper. His pointers are untrained, from 
an English sportsman's point of view, but hunting, 
pointing, and ' down-charging ' are hereditary in them. 
They are of the heavy Peninsular breed, the progeni- 
tors of the race of pointers all the world over ; por- 
tentously double-nosed, thick-muzzled dogs, endowed 
with the keenest scent, and very staunch. They 
potter along, ten or twenty yards in front of the, 
shooter, and never dream of ' ranging ' or ' quarter- 
ing,' but have as a rule been taught to retrieve. 



COUNTRY LIFE AND SPOET. 135 

To shoot over pointers, however, is not what the 
Portuguese sportsman most cares for. It is not soci- 
able enough. His motto, if he have one, is ' the greatest 
amusement of the greatest number (of men and dogs) ; ' 
and as the whole country, with the exception of 
walled enclosures of a certain height, is free to shoot 
over to any one responsible enough to be entrusted 
with a ten-shilling gun-licence, there is a paucity of 
game, and so to the sportsman's motto must be added 
— ' with the least possible expenditure of game' 

If I describe a Portuguese shooting party, a 
caqada — I shall be accused by some grave and intole- 
rant readers at home of wishing to make fun of a mode 
of sport which diners so entirely from our own ways 
of conducting these matters ; but this is not so at all. 
Some thoughtful persons who love to go deeply into 
the philosophy of things, may even think that the 
ethics of the chase are better apprehended in Portugal 
than at home. In England, to obtain three days of 
battue shooting in the year, we spend a little fortune 
in the wages of keepers and watchers, in preserving 
coverts, and in rearing birds. We go some way to 
corrupt the morals of a parish, and perhaps turn 
half a dozen idlers into felons ; we make tenants dis- 
contented, moderate people dissatisfied at seeing 
wealth and labour so ill and unprofitably spent, the 
humanitarian world is shocked at an unnecessary 
slaughter, and the non-sporting world of thinkers are 
mortified to see their countrymen engaged in one 
other form of indefensible folly. We make, in short, 
a small local revolution, financial and social, to get 



136 POBTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

three days of what is by general consent the very 
dullest, most monotonous, and most unsatisfactory 
form of sport in the world. 

Nothing of this kind happens in Portugal. There 
has been no preparation whatever for the sport, there 
is no expense, and there can be no temptation to poach- 
ing where there is no artificial abundance of game. 
There is absolutely no seriousness about the matter 
at all, it is amusement and relaxation pure and 
simple that is sought for ; there is no heart-burning 
between rival shots, no bribing of keepers, no 
favouritism, no ill-will possible anywhere or anyhow ; 
and lastly, no unpleasantly heavy bag to carry home 
after a long day's walking, 

A dozen gentlemen agree to bring their dogs 
together, and a pack numbering thirty or forty of all 
degrees — lurchers, terriers, greyhounds, and even 
pointers — is collected. Another dozen friends and 
acquaintances join the party. Among the whole of 
the gentlemen six or eight only carry guns ; the rest, 
sticks, the cow-sticks or quarter- staves, which are so 
much the badge of agriculturists of all classes, that 
even amateur rustics, gentlemen-farmers on their 
holiday, seldom go afield without one. Then does 
the chase begin. Many such a one have I engaged 
in, and of many heard the incidents narrated in the 
fullest detail. 

In a long and vociferous line we range through 
the great pine forests, -or the chestnut woods, poking, 
our sticks into the matted gorse and cistus, banging 
the tree trunks with resounding blows that echo 



COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT. 137 

among the hollow forest aisles. The dogs hunt a 
little, wrangle, bark, and fight a good deal, and 
would do so still more, but for the occasional flight, 
into their midst, of a well directed cow-stick. 
Nothing in the shape of game is seen ; a brown wood 
owl, indeed, flitting from an ivied oak tree, is im- 
mediately christened a woodcock by some imagina- 
tive person, and is brought down, amidst shouts of 
laughter, by a short-sighted gentleman, who holds 
up his eye-glass in explanation of his mistake. 
Another enthusiastic sportsman walking by my side 
stops me suddenly, pressing my arm with so much 
emphasis that I look to see some very large game 
indeed afoot. He points to a holly tree, 

' What is it ? ' I ask. 

4 Hush ; ' with his fingers across his lips, and he 
whispers in my ear, ' a blackbird ! ' 

My acquaintance is proceeding to a scientific 
' stalk ; ' but though the blackbird is legitimate game 
in Portugal, the party is too large, the dignity of the 
occasion too great, for the pursuit of such small deer. 
Responding to the loud remonstrances of everyone 
present, my companion retires from the pursuit, 
while the blackbird takes wing and disappears, with 
a shrill, crowing call. 

In the meantime, a great commotion is taking 
place in the centre of our line ; every man shouts out 
' Coelho ! ' Eabbit ! every dog gives tongue, every 
stick is waved in the air, thumped on the ground, or 
thrown with random aim into the tall undergrowth. 
Several guns are fired off. Nothing is hit. not even a 



138 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

dog. I observe that the older and more sagacious of 
the pack, when the first frenzy of excitement is over, 
retire a yard or two from the coverts, and watch for 
what may come out, as a terrier watches at a rat- 
hole. We all run to and fro madly, we charge and 
jostle each other, we scratch our faces in the bushes, 
we entangle our feet in the briars and fall head over 
heels, we scream with excitement, we shout with 
laughter. 

As yet I have seen nothing ; but presently I make 
out a little animal which I should take for a very large 
rat if experience did not tell me that it was a full-grown 
Portuguese rabbit, cantering in a leisurely manner 
towards two gentlemen with guns stationed on a 
neighbouring knoll, the only members of our party 
not in motion. These sportsmen cock their pieces, 
and, aiming apparently at the points of their own 
boots, fire simultaneously. We run up and look to 
where the ground is still smoking for the body of 
the rabbit. We find nothing but the hole of the 
burrow over which these gentlemen were mount- 
ing guard, and into which the rabbit has safely 
escaped. 

We all stop for ten minutes to argue, to recount, 
and laugh over the misadventure, then set off again 
through the unending forest glades. 

After this episode, a boy working at a saw-pit 
offers to show us a hare half a mile away ; we close 
with his offer, and eventually we shoot both hare and 
boy. The hare we bagged in a most literal sense, but 
the boy we only wounded very slightly — so slightly, 



COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT. 139 

indeed, that he recovered almost by magic from the 
fearful contortions of face and body which he was 
making, when he was presented with a silver crown, 
and, on being questioned, volunteered to be shot in 
the same way at the same price once a day for the 
rest of his lifetime, At first, I was seriously alarmed 
by his howls, and some of the eight gentlemen with 
guns who had fired sixteen barrels, more or less, in 
his direction turned pale as possible murderers. The 
poor boy was an outsider, and his interested howls 
were no test of his courage, I am convinced that no 
one of our party would have made any fuss at all for 
a pellet or two ; indeed, under the excitement of the 
rare appearance of game, the fusillade at these hunts 
is so hot and so irregular that no man who cannot 
trust his nerves under fire should ever join a Portu- 
guese cacada. Still it is use and temperament that 
make men cool ; and, well as the Portuguese have 
shown that they can stand fire in more serious fields 
than those of sport, I do not quite think they could 
come up to the equanimity which I have myself seen 
displayed by an English, gamekeeper. 

It is within my knowledge how, in a famous 
shooting county, an under-keeper was placed in the 
centre of a large wood to stop the birds. An Eton 
boy was among the shooters, and getting, as boys 
will, out of the regular line, and coming near to where 
the keeper was posted, he saw, glancing through the 
thick underwood, that person's brown-gaitered legs. 
The boy, taking them for a hare, fired ; but observing 
that the beast, as he thought, hopped away a short 



140 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

distance unhurt, he loaded his single-barrelled gun 
and fired again, so continuing to load and fire in hot 
haste — the faithful servant dodging about a good 
deal among the bushes, but never actually deserting 
his post. At last the line of shooters and beaters 
came up : — 

' Well, gentlemen ! ' said the keeper, ' I'm glad 
you've come at last ; the little gentleman have been 
a-pouring of it into me, terrible ! ' 

As to the hare of which I said that we bagged 
her in a very literal sense, it happened in this way : 
we found her on her form, and she had not, I am 
sure, left it two yards before she was coursed and 
caught by the greyhounds, attacked by the lurchers, 
and shot by everyone who had a gun ; consequently 
she was killed before she had given any sport what- 
ever. She made amends, however, afterwards. 
Among the pack was an ill-looking lurcher, whose 
bad. character had caused remonstrances to be 
addressed to the owner by the other sportsmen. 
' Coitado ! Poor dog ! ' said his possessor, ' let him 
come. He will be miserable if we leave him, and 
howl so that my wife will wish herself dead ! ' 

He came, and stuck to his master's heels the 
whole morning in the most exemplary manner. 
When the hare was killed it was his master who 
carried her, holding her by the hind legs, and the 
dog, seeing his opportunity come, suddenly gripped 
the animal in his teeth, and held on with such force, 
as his master tried to pull it away, that presently the 
dog was left with the head and the master with the 



COUNTRY LLFE AND SPORT. 141 

body. Others of the pack attracted by the noise, 
seized that part of the hare still held by the gentle- 
man, and got it from him, while another detachment 
of dogs pursued the lurcher with the head in his 
mouth. Then began a novel kind of chase, with 
more shouting and flying about of quarter-staves, and 
laughing and tumbling down. Some of us tried to 
recover the body, some chased the head. We were 
very much out of breath before we again got together 
the two portions of the hare. 

'Bring the needle and thread ! ' was called out — 
the needle and thread ! necessities in this kind of 
sport where the game is set upon by such packs. 

They were brought. The decapitated quarry 
was cleverly sewn together, the fur smoothed down, 
and then gravely insinuated into a narrow linen bag, 
also brought for the occasion. 

Then we pushed on again, and presently a volley 
from the whole force brought down a red-legged 
partridge ; a little further on and the dogs started a 
fox in a thick piece of gorse. We shot him. 
Another volley at close quarters proved fatal to a 
woodcock, whose long bill was nearly all that 
remained to prove his identity and the straight 
shooting of the eight gentlemen who had fired. 
Then came luncheon, and we fought all our battles 
over again, killing the slain many more times than 
thrice. Then we degenerated into politics — local 
chiefly, and election matters, just as we should have 
done at home. 

Now, I have noticed that Portuguese gentlemen 



142 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

of all shades of opinion, when they get together 
among friends, like to talk about and strongly to 
declaim against the realization of a certain wild pro- 
ject which is well known to European politicians as 
the Iberian Idea — the project, that is, of bringing 
Spain and Portugal together under a single crown. 
Oddly enough, this question is shirked in the Press of 
the country, though Liberals and Conservatives alike 
are against it, and, indeed, easily worked into a state 
of patriotic and very natural indignation at a mere 
suggestion of the possibility of such a thing. Even 
the Miguelites, who are still not uncommon through 
the country, though their cause is growing more and 
more a chimera with every year of peace and good 
government, and though their Miguelism now usually 
sits as lightly upon them as did his Jacobitism upon 
Dr. Johnson — even these, professedly unsatisfied men, 
protest against Iberianism as a thing running counter 
to all the interests, and the aspirations, and instincts, 
and grand traditions of the country. 

The truth about the Iberian idea is, I believe, 
simply this — that the possibility of its realization is 
not perhaps quite so remote as patriots and outsiders 
suppose. A large party has always desired it in 
Spain, and, curiously enough, a small one even in 
Portugal. The country itself, however, unlike some 
others, is too small for the unpatriotic, even when 
swelled by the fools, to make a large party. Among 
Continental politicians,the Absolutists, the Ultramon- 
tanes, and the Eeds would eacli for their own and 
obvious reasons like to see the Iberianism of the 



COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT. 143 

Peninsula an accomplished fact. In England, where 
we know by experience something of racial antipa- 
thies, no one, I suppose, would desire to bring about 
any such union, or even a federation of Spain and 
Portugal, always excepting the numerically insignifi- 
cant and incurable party among our own countrymen 
who tried to help on Carlism at the expense of 
toleration and free institutions, and who seemed at 
one time to expect in their unwisdom that Iberianism 
would advance their views. 

The only section of the British public who would 
actually benefit by a realisation of the Iberian idea 
would be the holders of Spanish Stocks. Spanish 
Three per Cents, would certainly go up, and Portu- 
guese as certainly go down. 

After lunch we had better sport and even better 
amusement than before. A brace of woodcocks 
were brought down and cleverly snatched from the 
dogs. A second hare got away from the guns, and 
was run into after a good course. Its exceedingly 
mangled remains were repaired as before, and fitted 
into another little bag. But the several rabbits we 
came upon gave more occupation and amusement 
than anything, doubling backwards and forwards 
among dogs and men to the most excitingly immi- 
nent peril of both. One gentleman, laying about him 
with his quarter-staff in the direction of a passing 
rabbit, struck his best friend so heavy a blow on the 
ankle that he dropped to it, and had to be ' restored ' 
before he could limp on with the party. 



144 POETlJGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

I do not know whether it is that the air of a 
Portuguese autumn day in these great sandy forests 
of pine or chestnut, with their gay undergrowth of 
aromatic shrubs, is more exhilarating than other air, 
and peculiarly conducive to a flow of good spirits, or 
whether the good humour and enjoyment come from 
the incidents and circumstances of a Portuguese 
shooting party ; certain it is that the thing is most 
enjoyable. In describing this particular one, I am 
not telling of what happened on any particular day, 
or to any particular set of people : I could not ven- 
ture upon such an impertinence to, my friends to 
please any reader. It is a general account of a 
typical caqada ; and those who know what such a 
thing is will agree that it is not unfaithful. In many 
a one have I joined, and, coming home again, I have 
sometimes compared the day's sport with one spent 
in English coverts. In Portugal, a pleasant day's 
ramble in the forest, with not much game indeed in 
hand at the end of it, but the lasting memory of 
many very surprising and unlooked-for adventures 
and misadventures. In England, a return homeward 
often wet through and chilled to the bone, having 
stood for hours in the sleety wind, over the ankles in 
mud and water, my right shoulder stiff and sore from 
long and monotonous shooting, perhaps my host 
looking black at me for having missed the solitary 
woodcock of the day, or for having killed more than 
my allowance of hen pheasants. 

When French people wish to say that a party of 
pleasure has been successful, they sum up with the 



COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT. 



145 



phrase, ' Nous avons beaucoup ri! I could always 
have made the same remark after a shooting expedi- 
tion into the woods of Portugal. 

It is the poet Thomson, I think, who has said that 
' a serene melancholy is the most noble and most 
agreeable situation of the human mind ; ' but admit- 
ting all the nobility and serene delight of melancholy, 
that mental attitude would be a most difficult one to 
maintain among an enthusiastic and good-humoured 
party of Portuguese sportsmen out for a cacada. 




COUNTRY HOUSE IN PORTUGAL. 



146 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 



CHAPTER V, 

FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 

He who comes to Portugal in autumn in search of 
the picturesque must not, as a rule, expect to find it 
quite after the pattern to which he has become ac- 
customed in Northern Europe. Here there is none 
of the calm and stately beauty of an English autumn, 
the leafage slowly bronzing with the early touches of 
frost, the russet bracken standing up in finer contrast 
than ever with the greenery around, and the fallen 
beech leaves spread like golden patines on the smooth 
sheep-cropped turf. This is very delightful, — and 
pleasant it is in the keen October air of our own 
country to walk out and see the slow and gradual 
death of the year ; a summer mellowed and tempered 
with the coming breath of frost and snow, — a winter 
still warm with the sun of the waning summer. 

After a different fashion does autumn come upon 
us here in Portugal. The meeting of summer and 
winter is not a gradual transition, but a sudden con- 
test. To walk out upon an autumn day is not to 
assist at a euthanasia, but to see the victims of a 
oreat elemental strife : the fields are fields on which 
a battle has been fought. 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 147 

The hot Lusitanian sun has stimulated an extra- 
ordinary wealth of branch and leaf growth, and sud- 
denly the downpour of equinoctial rain has come 
upon it, and the strong winds have brayed and broken 
everything, and covered the fields with leaves sodden 
and decaying already in the warm and steamy air. 
In the most cultivated districts the waste and desola- 
tion are greatest, for the maize straw is mostly lying 
in the fields in discoloured stooks, — the most unsightly 
of harvests, — and the vines are no longer picturesque, 
but their long sprays straggling where the wind has 
left them, and their leaves either falling or hanging 
down half withered and unshapely, have lost all the 
rich sun : tints of summer. 

The damp atmosphere which hangs over the 
land at this time of the year is to some susceptible 
constitutions a little ague-laden, and I warn the 
tourist against a visit to Portugal till the heat 
of early autumn be overpast, till the last week in 
October, when bright, clear weather is the rule 
for all the rest of the year. When St. Martin's 
summer begins — on or about the 11th of Novem- 
ber — there have disappeared the very last of the 
mosquitoes ; and though they are little troublesome 
in Portugal, attacking one only at night, their 
bite grows more and more envenomed as the sum- 
mer gets older, till in September they are at their 
fiercest. 

A far worse plague than mosquitoes is also past, 
— the plague of flies. The present writer may claim 
to have done his full share of the travelling which 

L 2 



118 POKTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

modern society requires of its members. He has 
cheerfully set out on, and often more cheerfully re- 
turned from, rambles in most European countries. He 
has come to the conclusion that among the greatest 
evils of foreign travel in the South are the flies ; more 
troublesome than beggars in Spain or donkey-boys in 
Egypt, worse than the inn-keepers of Germany or 
the brigands of Italy, greater pests even than vul- 
gar Englishmen in Switzerland. 

It is so much the fashion for modern philosophers 
to deal with the infinitesimal, and triumphantly to 
trace great effects to small and unsuspected causes, 
that one may well wonder that science has so com- 
pletely overlooked the influence of flies upon the 
destinies of the human race. The savant whose 
guiding principle often is de minimis curat scientia, 
might build up a very pretty theory upon the rela- 
tions of Musca domestica and Homo sapiens, and a 
difference of manners, of habits, of temperament, and 
even of dress, might be traced between the people of 
countries where the house-fly is numerous and active, 
and countries like England where it can almost be 
left out of account altogether. The swarms of flies 
are in the South no trivial matter in the economy of 
life, but, though an every-day incident, one im- 
portant enough to be had in serious consideration, — 
to be made, for instance, the subject of grave simile 
and comparison. When Homer is describing the 
heroic rally of the Trojan warriors round the dead 
body of Sarpedon, lie does not think it beneath the 
dignity of the occasion to compare their numbers 






FARMING AND FAEM PEOPLE. 149 

and their obstinacy, and the noise of their arms in 
fight to the clouds of flies which 

At spring time in the cattle-sheds 
Around the milk-pail swarm with buzzing wings. 

To take but one point : — the habit of taking a 
siesta, a habit in itself modifying the whole home-life 
and character of a people, and one which we North- 
erners consider so thoroughly effeminate, is certainly 
due not to the heat of the South, but to its flies. 
None but those who have suffered it can have any 
notion of the exasperation which is caused to a man 
who is the victim of a cloud of buzzing flies through- 
out a long summer day. Mental labour becomes 
quite impossible when things get to their worst, at 
three or four o'clock, when the afternoon is hottest 
and drowsiest and the flies at their busiest. At such 
a moment the human intellect is almost incapable of 
exertion ; no brain could work out a long division sum, 
no one could write a leading article or even a sermon. 
A man is driven to a dark room where the flies will 
not follow him ; he goes not for coolness only but for 
peace, and being at rest and in the dark, he necessarily 
sleeps. This is the rationale of the siesta of the South. 

It is only inside the house that the flies are wholly 
intolerable ; out of doors they are as numerous but 
not aggressive. In Malta I once saw a regiment 
seemingly of clergymen marching along the high road, 
— a fearful spectacle ! A closer inspection showed 
that this alarming infantry was nothing more formid- 
able than a body of our own honest soldiers, with 



150 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

their scarlet uniforms blackened and quite concealed 
by myriads of flies. But flies in the open air are 
stationary and on their good behaviour ; indoors the 
Southern fly is ever on the move, qucerens quern and 
quid devoret. It is the home-keeping women who 
suffer, not the men who have gone afield ; and there- 
fore it is the women who always cover their heads 
with hoods or handkerchiefs, the men only when they 
live indoor lives, — hence monks are hooded, women 
veiled. One step more and we have the Yashmak of 
the Turk, the Zenana, a general invasion of women's 
rights and liberties, and I know not what beside, — and 
all to be traced, if philosophers would but see it, to 
so seemingly trivial a cause as the common house-fly ! 

So far as weather is concerned, I do not know 
that after all I do well to warn my compatriots 
against the steamy air of a Portuguese autumn. We 
all, Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotchmen, Welshmen, and 
Cockneys, have a weakness for dull weather. We 
have eaten and slept and walked and talked in fog 
and rain ; it has come to be a second nature to us. 
In truth the Briton admires but does not always in 
his heart love the climate of what he is pleased to call 
' the sunny south.' Its brightness to him is glare, its 
constancy monotonous. 'These blue skies are charm- 
ing in theory,' I once heard a candid Englishman say, 
' but the long droughts are too much for me, they 
burn me up, the sunlight oppresses me, — I want 
moisture, I want rain, — I want,' he said with a loving 
emphasis on the words, ' nice, warm, muggy rain ! ' 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 151 

If the traveller is not to be deterred by dull skies 
and rain, and will come to Portuguese soil during the 
autumnal equinox, he will find the country, in so far 
as its agriculture is concerned, at its most critical and 
most interesting stage. 

The social, financial, political, and even reli- 
gious aspects of Portugal are almost wholly identical 
with its aspects as a country of farmers, of vine- 
dressers, of shepherds, and of graziers. Except for a 
small population of miners, of fishermen on the rivers 
and estuaries, and of sailors, the whole population 
should be, if political economy had proper sway in 
the country, purely an agricultural one. Unfortu- 
nately, very fallacious principles prevail among the 
governing classes, and several branches of manu- 
factures are encouraged to languish, and the people 
are heavily taxed by a high and omnivorous tariff, 
Portugal, however, is a country which, since its 
liberal awakening fifty years ago, has shown such 
progressive wisdom in all the arts of government, that 
I firmly believe that all these false protective theories 
wait but ' the inevitable hour ' to be swept away, and 
that when the country awakes to common sense in 
such matters it will become, more thoroughly than it 
is even at present, a country of farmers. Even now 
the intelligent observer of foreign social problems 
looks to find their solution in the condition of agricul- 
ture. I have met with more than one such observer 
on their travels, and their honest expression of opinions, 
even when they have little time or opportunity or 
perhaps ability to form them soundly, are always 



152 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

interesting and often instructive, though not always 
in a way they themselves might suppose or desire. 

A stout, intelligent, and highly conversational 
German was holding forth fluently at the table d'hote 
of an hotel in a certain important city of Portugal 
as I not long ago took my seat at that board, and I 
listened with patience to his opinions. The Germans, 
as everyone knows, have lately, and only lately, 
become a highly practical people. Delighting no 
longer to hold aloof from the ways of ordinary men 
and to keep to the cloudland of ideology and transcen- 
dentalism, they have descended to terra jirma, and are 
willing to instruct the whole world in the business of 
its daily life. Does a financier think he understands 
the exchanges and the fluctuations in the bullion 
market ? Let him talk for five minutes to a German 
and learn his ignorance. Do we Englishmen and 
Americans think we know something by experience of 
representative government? The first Berliner shall 
show us our mistake. The schoolmaster who is now 
abroad in the world is the German Professor, and he is 
no longer either abstruse, or impracticable, or philo- 
sophically contemptuous of Philistinism. Perhaps 
we want to know how to fight or to farm, to garden 
or to cook, to write books or to paint pictures ? The 
Professor will instruct us, and if we do not want to 
be instructed, he will instruct us all the same — or all 
the more. 

4 After all, these Portuguese are fools,' the German 
was saying, — he qualified the word by an epithet 
which need not be recorded — ' they are fools, gentle- 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 153 

men, as farmers : they fatten cattle without cake 
or roots ; they don't know how to make their hay ; 
instead of reaping their corn with a machine, they 
cut it with a thing like a gardener's knife ; and when 
they might use improved ploughs by good makers, 
they employ a crooked branch with a tenpenny nail 
tied to the end of it ! ' 

The wit rather, than the wisdom of the speaker 
(who delivered himself in an English which though 
fluent I have ventured to transpose into a more 
vernacular key) caused a laugh among those of us 
who understood him. 

I gathered from some further remarks which fell 
from this gentleman, that he was one of the class who 
travel in the interests of their friends at home, and 
generally carry assortments of the staples of these 
friends' business in bags or other receptacles. From 
the cynical tone noticeable in his conversation I 
concluded that he had found some difficulty in 
4 placing ' these goods among the Portuguese. No 
men are so full of information and opinions as 
' travellers ' of this class, or so anxious to impart 
them, and I was willing enough to be instructed. 

' I must admit,' I replied, ' that the Portuguese 
farmers are little better than barbarians from your 
point of view, but what I should like to gather from 
you is, how it would better their condition to use all 
these new-fangled improvements.' 

My new acquaintance smiled a serene smile. 

' You have perhaps, sir, not read the works of the 
great English writer Smith ? ' he asked. 



154 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

' I have read Adam Smith in the original,' I 
answered. 

' You will then perfectly understand how the 
wealth of nations can be increased by division of 
labour, and by economy of labour, and by perfection 
of labour. Now, it is clear that when a farmer cuts 
a clumsy plough from the nearest wood, hammers out 
his own ploughshare, and ploughs his own land with 
this miserable implement, there is neither division of 
labour, nor economy of labour, nor perfection of 
labour.' 

' You could not,' I said, ' put it more neatly.' 

My stout acquaintance smiled again. 

' It is the same all through the farm system. The 
farmer might use cake to feed his cattle and enrich 
his fields.' 

' I admit the cake.' 

' And surely, sir, you must admit that he could 
grow roots with advantage, reap his corn crop with a 
patent reaper, and his grass with a patent mower. 
He might cut his chaff by steam, pulp his roots by 
machinery, steam them in one of our patent steamers ; 
to say nothing of employing our improved elevators, 
and rollers, and crushers, and scarifiers, of all of 
which, poor man, he is as ignorant as the child un- 
born.' 

I took advantage of a slight pause, during which 
the German took out an illustrated catalogue of a 
well-known English firm of agricultural implement- 
makers, to say — 

6 But, assuming that he coidd employ all these 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 155 

improvements, and reform his ways with all these 
novelties, how would he be the better ? ' 

4 Sir, he would be the richer.' 

4 Would he be the happier ? ' 

Herr Sacculator smiled for the third time. 
4 Really,' he said, ' I think we may assume that wealth 
is the first step towards happiness.' 

4 I believe,' I said, 4 that we know as little of the 
first as of any subsequent step on that road.' 

Irony was never well bestowed on a German, and 
he went on : ' The mere possession of good wages is 
certainly in itself a most excellent thing. It gives a 
man opportunities for dealing with the political 
machinery of his country, and leisure for self-culture 
and the various graces of life.' 

' In some parts of the county of Hertfordshire in 
England,' I remarked, ' the women and children work 
at straw-plaiting, and each family makes a good deal 
of money. Yet the people do not care a rush for 
politics, and are so removed from self-culture and the 
graces of life that a more idle, poaching, ill-mannered, 
immoral set of sots are not to be found in broad 
England.' 

Facts are as nothing when compared with general 
principles, and the German gentleman proceeded 
undisturbed. 

4 You will surely,' he said, 4 not put forward such 
a paradox as that poverty conduces to a people's 
happiness more than wealth ? ' 

4 Sir,' I said, 4 if I put forward, or seem to put 
forward, any paradox whatever^ it is less to defend it 



156 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

than to give you the opportunity of refuting it. If 
you can show me that wealth and welfare are the 
same things, you are very welcome to do so.' 

' If I can in any way conduce to the making of 
the Portuguese a wealthy people, it is clear that I 
make them also a happy people.' 

' Then it is obvious,' I said, ' that the more chaff- 
cutters and patent rollers and scarifiers and elevators 
the Portuguese can be got to take, the happier they 
will become.' 

4 Certainly ; the more contented.' 

' I know nothing of that,' I said. ' It may be less 
what he gains than what he looks to gain that makes 
a peasant contented. Peasants are only human after all.' 

4 Those are refinements,' said the German shrewdly, 
4 that I would rather not enter into. Wealth, I say, 
and contentment are correlative terms.' 

Then we argued, or rather the German argued, 
and he declaimed, and he convinced himself, and con- 
vinced himself that he had convinced me, and finally 
at parting he shook hands with me, and expressed his 
pleasure at having encountered so entirely reasonable 
a person as myself. 

I trust that I am at least not stupid enough to try 
to confute a man against his will ; I am sure that I 
have enough sense not to think I can convince any 
man against his interest. The German gentleman 
may possibly have been right in his conclusions, but 
he had arrived at them in considerable ignorance of 
the facts ; and there is certainly this one advantage 
in seeing much of the world, and coming into contact 



FARMING AND FARM PFOPLE. 157 

with the great variety of unpleasing facts and people 
therein contained, that a man gets at last almost to 
lose the disagreeable habit of generalizing and any 
undue sense of the value of general principles — most 
fertile sources of disputation and argument. A roiling 
stone gathers no moss ; a Professor vegetating in a little 
German University — the educated German is ever of 
the Professorial type — gathers a great deal, and 
evolves in the unwholesome atmosphere about him so 
much of prejudice and preconception, as that hardly 
any collision with the hard edges of stubborn facts 
shall ever afterwards rid him of. Still my German 
chance acquaintance was so intelligent a person that 
he might have hesitated to suggest a violent reform of 
the whole system of Portuguese agriculture, had he 
known only as much of its conditions as it is my inten- 
tion to communicate to the reader forthwith. His 
judgment was indeed becoming visibly affected by so 
much of the true doctrine as I was able to instil into 
him between the courses of the table cVhote dinner. 

Farming in Portugal is, as I must admit, at a 
standstill, and it has moved very little for some four- 
teen hundred years. There is consequently immense 
room for improvement. For every hundred bushels 
of corn that are now produced another fifty could, I 
have little doubt, be grown, with improved hus- 
bandry ; and two hundred beasts could probably be 
fattened for every hundred that the farmers now sell. 
The nation would therefore, if this be so, become a 
richer nation ; but this could only be the case after a 



158 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

profound modification of the existing condition of 
things. Though the political economist might wel- 
come a nation with a doubled power of consuming 
cotton goods and hardware, and though the statistician 
might like to write down on his tables so many more 
millions of Portuguese souls, horned cattle, sheep, 
pigs, and bushels of corn, it does not at all follow that 
the sum of human well-being would be one jot the 
greater, that the star of happiness would be one 
degree higher in the Portuguese heavens, or that 
some very disagreeable problems would not present 
themselves for solution which now no Portuguese 
statesman is ever called upon to solve. 

If I did not think there were some lessons to be 
learned from the conduct of a Portuguese farm, I 
should not venture to say so much as I am going to 
say about Portuguese farming. 

Though we are so backward in all the arts of 
agriculture, we yet in Portugal can do what if all 
British farmers could do the wealth of Great Britain 
would be trebled, aud the tide turned against agricul- 
tural distress for a century. 

We can grow corn in Portugal on the same land 
year after year. I say ' we,' for I am myself a prac- 
tical farmer, and have farmed in Portugal for more 
than ten years. The reader shall presently see how 
we solve this great problem of continuous corn-crop- 
ing, and, if he be a farmer, he shall judge how far the 
system can be made applicable at home. 

I think our five bad English harvests have brought 
home to us more feelingly than ever how great an 



FARMING AND FAEM PEOPLE. 159 

interest the farming is, how much more important 
than any other, almost than all others. An excellent 
authority has just been laying down almost as a new 
discovery what certainly should have forced itself on 
our convictions long enough ago as little better than 
a platitude. ' The success,' says this eminent econo- 
mist, ' with which agriculture is practised in a country 
is the measure of that part of the population which is 
set free for other employment, or may subsist at 
leisure.' He could not have said a truer thing, though, 
perhaps, he might have put his truth more fully and 
more clearly. 

Now, if we look back at the agricultural history 
of any country, which is not by some exceptional 
degree of fertility or vastness in its territory elevated 
above and beyond the reach and wish of competition 
from other countries ; if we look at the farm history 
of our own country, for instance, we shall see that its 
agricultural industry has thriven, not progressively, 
but by fits and starts : now a time of depression, now a 
revival, and after it, for a time, prosperity again. In 
countries like America and Eussia, of great natural 
fertility and suitable climate, breadcorn, the staple of 
farming everywhere, may go on for ever being pro- 
duced on their vast productive prairies and steppes, 
with the minimum of interference from man's intelli- 
gence ; but we know but too well how little that is the 
case at home. Here, if we are to thrive, it is our own 
wits that must beat the elements, and win the day for 
us against competition from the outside. 

If we look back at the records of British farming 



160 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. . 

we may read plainly how its periods of prosperity, 
local or general, have ever followed some capital device 
of man's ingenuity, some invention, some new process, 
or the novel application of some established principle. 
Now the good times followed the introduction of the 
new turnip -growing system ; now they followed the 
system of artificial grasses ; now of the imported and 
manufactured chemical manures, or of the artificial 
foods for sheep and oxen. Or again, it was the use 
of farm machinery which filled the farmers' pockets, 
or the improved breeds of cattle which fattened early, 
and gave him beef where his fathers got bone ; and 
always, as competition pressed on, the impulse lost its 
force, and dying away left all farming better, all Eng- 
land the richer, but no one farmer better off than his 
neighbour. 

Of these various devices and inventions many came 
from abroad, as every farmer knows, and chiefly from 
the north-western parts of Europe, where men's wits 
are keenest, the population thickest, and the struggle 
with nature most active. I am not aware that any 
one idea has ever come in recent years from the south 
of Europe. From Portugal certainly we have never 
imported a single agricultural idea with the splendid 
cattle and the many pipes of port wine which that 
country annually sends us ; and yet it is in this back- 
ward country that the thing is done which, if England 
could do, England's wealth would be trebled and quad- 
rupled. Nothing so astonished me, when I first saw a 
luxuriant Portuguese maize field, as to be told that it 
had produced such a crop summer after summer for a 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 161 

century, and would continue to do as much for as long 
again. It was some little time before the solution of 
this problem became manifest to me. The reader 
shall have the means of judging whether it is in Portu- 
gal only that this profitable feat is to be performed, or 
whether our English farmers may not do as much. 



The land in Portugal throughout the length and 
breadth of the country is held under five principal 
kinds of tenure — the allodial, the emphyteutic, the 
leasehold, the communal, and a tenure termed 
Parceria rural, which differs but little from the 
Metayer system of Bavaria, France, and Italy. Here, 
as in those countries, the landlord finds the land and 
sometimes the seed, and receives for rent a proportion 
of the produce. 

The Allodial is the tenure which prevails chiefly 
in the wide and naturally fertile plains of Central and 
Southern Portugal. The holder of the fee simple of 
the land either tills his own broad acres with the 
minimum of capital, energy, and knowledge, or, if the 
estate is too large, lets it on short and uncertain 
leases to tenants who take his place and farm it, 
almost to as little purpose as himself. The Com- 
munal tenure is to be found chiefly in the wilder and 
more mountainous regions ; the communist holders 
are, for the most part, the lineal descendants of the 
original communal grantees of the land at a time 
when the country had just been recovered from its 
Saracen occupants. Such holdings were, no doubt, 
frequent in parts of the country where now the 

M 



162 POETUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

original communists have been, in the course of suc- 
cessive ages, bought out, or forced or cheated out of 
their lands by neighbouring nobles or churchmen. 
Wherever remoteness or the poverty of the soil 
offered no temptation to such powerful encroachers 
and swindlers, the communes have endured, though 
often greatly mutilated of their original rights and 
privileges. On the mountain frontier between Leon 
and Portugal, I have found cases where they had 
dwindled to the common possession of a range of 
pasturage or a grove of chestnuts, a couple of rams 
or a single bull. 

The metayer system is commoner in the South 
and Centre than in the North. It seems in Portugal, 
as elsewhere, to have grown out of the want of capital 
in landlords and in tenants, and, as elsewhere, it is 
probably the best possible system where such im- 
pecuniosity prevails. In Scotland, as is well known, 
much valuable land, has been brought into cultivation 
through the working of this system, and every 
political economist remembers the discussion raised 
by Sismondi upon the metayer system, and knows all 
about its various advantages and disadvantages, In 
Scotland, payment of rent in kind has given place 
to money payments ; in Portugal, neither enough 
agricultural nor enough financial advance has b^en 
achieved to make this possible, and for the metayer 
system this only can be said that, while agriculture 
under it is unprogressive, the condition of the people ■'■ 
who engage in it is infinitely superior to where the;; 
lord of large estates cultivates the land himself, or 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 163 

deputes it to tenants who can afford to the labourer 
only the barest means of subsistence, and who are by 
necessity alien to him in degree and in interest. The 
metayer, on the other hand, is a man of small means, 
but he is, as it were, insured against absolute ruin, for 
he divides his losses as he divides his gains with his land- 
lord ; he has the strongest motive for hard work and 
good work, for his welfare depends upon both, and — 
chief advantage of all — he himself being hardly higher 
in rank than the peasant whom he has hired to work 
with him, there can be some social sympathy between 
employer and employed. The Portuguese metayer 
need not be a capitalist, in even the most limited 
sense, and every labourer may aspire to become a 
metayer himself. The peasant, therefore, has that 
without which labour is but another name for 
serfdom : he knows that the lottery of life may hold 
a prize for him, and it sweetens his toil to feel that 
his own diligence and honesty can help him to the 
winning of it. 

There is in Portugal another tenure of land, the 
Emphyteutic, in some of its incidents so singular, and 
in its origin and development so unlike anything to 
be found elsewhere, and in all these respects so in- 
structive, that I make no apology for dwelling upon 
it at some little length. 

Portugal, as everyone must remember from his 
first geography lessons, is a narrow strip of country, 
extremely mountainous where it marches with Spain, 
hilly in its three northern provinces, and having 
broad and fertile plains in its centre, through which 

M 2 



1G4 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

plains the Eiver Tagus flows to the sea. The most 
southerly of its six provinces, Algarve, is in its 
climate, in the aridity of its soil, and even its 
palmetto-covered plains and hill slopes, like a bit cut 
off from Africa. Here the communal tenure is still 
to be found, but the land is also held allodially and 
by leasehold. It is in the rich central provinces of 
Estremadura and Alemtejo that the allodial tenures 
chiefly prevail. In the remote frontier province of 
Traz os Montes, lying beyond the important hill range 
of the Marao, in the north-easterly corner of the 
kingdom, the communal system of tenures is to be 
found ; and in the populous province of the Minho, 
the most northerly of all, the estates are small and 
numerous, and held, as a rule, emphyteutically. 
This is the most prosperous district in Portugal, and 
probably in the whole Iberian peninsula. The Minho 
has been compared to Lombardy, and the Minhotes, 
from their gentler manners, gayer character, and 
better looks, have been called the Italians of Portu- 
gal. Yet this superiority is certainly not due to soil, 
for the province is by no means the most naturally 
fertile of Portugal ; nor to difference of race, for the 
population of the kingdom, from the Tagus, north- 
ward at least, are probably homogeneous, or nearly 
so. Its prosperity is, I believe, chiefly due to the 
existence of a tenure by which the length and 
breadth of the province is parcelled out among small 
yeomen landlords — a tenure with many of the inci- 
dents of our English copyholds — and partly again is 
this prosperity owing to the vicissitudes in the history 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 165 

of its peasantry, which have ended in the achieve- 
ment by them of this excellent tenure. 

I must ask for the reader's patience while I tell 
him how it was that time and a somewhat fortunate 
coincidence of events, and, not least, their own pru- 
dence and determination, have won for the yeomen 
of the Minho the happy condition in which they now 
find themselves. 

Portugal differs from most of the countries of 
Europe in this, that no permanent and general settle- 
ment of the land was made or was possible until a 
comparatively late period. The laws, the customs, 
and the institutions left by the Eoman colonists in 
Portugal were more or less effaced by the incursions 
of northern nations ; and before these barbarians had 
time to settle into the fairly decent feudal Christians 
of mediaeval Europe, their backwood laws, and their 
customs, and their institutions were all but effaced by 
the Saracenic invasions and occupations, and the sub- 
sequent conflicts of the eighth and following four 
centuries. The advance of Saracenic conquest had 
destroyed or swept into captivity the inhabitants of 
vast tracts of the country ; and though these regions 
were gradually resettled and repeopled by the Portu- 
guese, the final ascendency of the Christians was an 
issue of such slow growth and such gradual consum- 
mation, that when at last the Moors had been driven 
from the land, no claimants were forthcoming for 
much of the reconquered territory. A large share of 
this unowned land was apportioned among the mili- 
tary leaders and the nobles ; a larger share became 



166 POETUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

Church or convent property ; and the largest share 
of all fell to the lot of the great Military Order which 
had waged a holy war on the soil of Portugal, and 
had mainly helped in its recovery. 

If the land had come chiefly into the hands of the 
nobles, as in some other countries, the eventual for- 
mation of emphyteutic estates would probably have 
become impossible ; but it resulted from the gener- 
osity towards the Church both of kings and private 
donors, and from the comparative parsimony of royal 
land grants to individuals, that the Church became 
the chief possessor of real property throughout the 
country ; and the prelates and heads of monastic 
orders occupied the place and possessed the influence 
of the great landholding nobility of our own and of 
other countries of Northern Europe. 

The contests between the barons and the kings of 
England were anticipated in Portugal by contests 
between the landholding prelates and their sovereigns. 
The history of Portugal in the two hundred years 
which followed the expulsion of the Saracens is the 
narrative of this strife, in which the churchmen never 
failed to lose ground, and the sovereign ever sought 
to lessen their influence. No better means of doing 
so presented itself than to diminish their paramount 
influence as landholders ; and with this object, and 
also, it may be inferred, to re-occupy the wasted 
country, the efforts of nearly every successive 
monarch, after the departure of the Moors, were 
directed to establish proprietors and cultivators of 
the soil other than monkish ones. Particular care was 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 167 

taken that these newly-formed holdings should be 
limited in size. King Sancho I., the successor of the 
first great king and conqueror, Affonzo Henriquez, 
was unwilling to bestow on an individual more land 
than he could cultivate with his family, his slaves 
and his servants. This example was followed by 
King Sancho's successors. 

The waning power of the Church would no doubt 
indirectly tend to bring about the same end — namely, 
a multiplication of small proprietary or semi-proprie- 
tary holdings ; for the small convent farmers, origi- 
nally tenants at will or for definite periods, as soon as 
they perceived their monastic landlords to be losing 
power, clamoured for and obtained fixity of tenure and 
fixity of rent. The holding thus granted, or not dis- 
puted, was termed aforamento, or a holding by payment 
of aforo or fixed rent ; and this good old Portuguese 
word would have been the designation of the tenure 
to this day, only that later on, when letters revived, 
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there revived 
too the learning of the Eoman jurists, and the 
pedantry rather than the necessity of the Portuguese 
antiquarian lawyers led them to christen the old 
tenure by the Greek and Latin name emphyteusis. 
The ancient emphyteutic tenure is almost close 
enough in its resemblance to the vulgar aforamento 
to justify the pedantry of the antiquaries; and 
though the farmers themselves will not part with 
the old word, the lawyers use no other than emphy- 
teusis for a copyhold estate and emphyteuta for a 
copyholder. 



168 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

By the course of events which I have been en- 
deavouring to describe, the emphyteutas obtained 
some sort of a hold upon the land ; but it was still a 
precarious one, and their position for a long succes- 
sion of generations was wretched in the extreme. 

Many causes were constantly at work to im- 
poverish their holdings, and to perpetuate and aug- 
ment the allodial estates and the wealth of the larger 
proprietors — churchmen and nobles — their lords and 
their neighbours. The very stringent law of entail 
and primogeniture existing in Portugal, directly 
devised to consolidate the great estates, was not 
relaxed till late in the eighteenth century, and the 
ever-recurring diminution of the emphyteutic estate 
by fines upon alienation and succession (fines and 
heriots were from the first incidents of emphyteusis) 
could not but keep these small proprietors in a state 
of miserable penury and dependence. 

In the middle of the fifteenth century their con- 
dition had become — in their own opinion at least — 
abject. In a memorial addressed to King Affonzo V., 
they speak of themselves in pitiable terms, as having 
to part with their very cattle to satisfy their lords, as 
being ground down by exaction, and as being — as 
they express it — shorn like flocks of sheep. In 
picturesque language, they represent themselves as 
being driven into the towns by hunger and by op- 
pression, and that the very beasts of the field, the 
birds and the insects, had conspired to rob them of 
the few grains of corn which they still possessed. 
The patriotism of the kings of Portugal, or their 



FARMING AND FARM PEOFLE. 169 

anxiety to countervail and impair the power of the 
Church and the nobles, did not suffer them to leave 
such petitions unanswered ; but relief to the Portu- 
guese yeomen reached them slowly. It is by no 
means unlikely that their estates would have fallen, 
in time, into the possession of the great landholders, 
but for the action of two causes, both singular in this 
respect, that one of them did not and the second 
could not happen in any of the countries of Northern 
Europe. The first of these causes was the sudden 
growth throughout Portugal of a thirst for foreign 
and distant discovery and conquest, fostered by the 
Infante Dom Enrique at the beginning of the 
fifteenth century. 

This spirit of adventure continued for two centuries 
to be almost universal among the upper and the upper 
middle classes of Portugal. The natural desire of 
these classes to acquire influence by acquiring land 
was directed to this novel and speedier mode of gain- 
ing money, influence, and fame. Wealth flowed into 
the country, but it was spent luxuriously in the cities, 
and country life has never since those days been 
popular with the richer classes in the same way that 
it is popular in France, in Germany or in England, 
and the possession of landed property never such an 
object of ambition. 

The second cause of the consolidation and pros- 
perity of the emphyteutic estates will appear even 
more singular to an English agriculturist. This was 
the introduction from America of the cultivation of 
maize in the middle of the sixteenth century. Much 



170 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

more than root crops and rye grass have done for 
the Low Countries or the potato for Ireland has been 
done by maize in Spain and Portngal. This produc- 
tive grain has been a boon to Portuguese farmers, 
and above all other farmers to the emphyteutic 
farmer. It is obvious that, granting fixity of tenure 
under unalterable conditions of rent, services and 
obligations, — however burdensome they may origin- 
ally have been, — the contract having been made in 
unsettled times, and in a half-peopled country, these 
conditions must necessarily grow less burdensome 
with the increase of population, with the develop- 
ment of communications, with the growth of security 
to life and property and with the general rise in 
agricultural prices which always accompanies these 
conditions. This has happened ; and no single cause 
has contributed so much as the possession by the 
farmer of the new cereal, which enabled him to more 
than double the yield of his corn-fields. 

As years went on, the grievances of the yeo- 
man proprietors, as set foi'th in the memorial I 
have quoted above, righted themselves ; the rack 
rents became quit rents, and the recurring fines 
and the exactions of the superior lords became 
trifling in comparison with the increased value of 
the land. 

When the first great statutory reform of the em- 
phyteutic system was made in 1832, upon the 
ascendency of the Liberal cause and the establishment 
of Liberal principles in Portugal, the emphyteutic 
tenures were burdensome rather from the compli- 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 171 

cated and uncertain state of the law relating to them, 
than from any actual hardship to the holders. 1 

The operations of farming throughout non-pastoral 
Portugal do not materially differ from those in other 

1 The law relating to Emphyteusis is now finally defined and 
settled by the Civil Code promulgated in August, 1867. The 
rent is to be fixed by mutual agreement, not by any custom ; fines 
on alienation and succession are abolished ; the emphyteutic 
estate, though hereditary, is not to be parcelled among the heirs, 
except with the consent of the lord ; the value of the estate is to 
be discovered by assessment, and distributed among the heirs 
according to law. (By Portuguese law, only one-third of the 
testator's possessions can, in the majority of cases, be disposed of 
by will ; two-thirds are divided among the heirs.) If they cannot 
agree upon a valuation, the value is to be decided judicially. The 
heirs are to determine among themselves upon which of them the 
estate is to devolve, with reference to a court of law in case of 
their non-agreement ; if none of them desire to hold it, the estate 
is to be sold, and the price to be divided equally among them. In 
case of non-payment of rent, the lord may proceed to recover it as 
an ordinary debt, with interest, but has no right of re-entry even 
though such a right be expressly stipulated for. An action for 
the recovery of arrears does not extend further back than five 
years. If the holder waste the estate, so that it fall below the 
value of a sum equivalent to the rent capitalized, with one-fifth 
added, the lord may re-enter into possession without making any 
compensation to the holder ; the holder may mortgage the estate 
without the consent of the lord, provided the sum so raised do not 
exceed the capitalized rent, with one fifth added. The holder may 
alienate, after due notice to his lord, who has a right of pre- 
emption. The lord may also alienate his part of the estate (his 
seignorial rights), likewise giving notice to the holder, and in such 
a case a corresponding right of pre-emption resides with the 
latter. These provisions apply to emphyteutic estates created 
after the publication of the Codes (except those provisions relating 
to succession, which take effect retrospectively), and it will be 
observed that, excepting the lord's right of entry in case of waste, 
they are all in favour of the holder. 

The emphyteutic lord has by this legislation come to be hardly 



172 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

parts of Southern Europe, where wheat, rye, and 
maize are the corn crops, where oxen and mules are 
the beasts of draught, and where the cattle are stall- 
fed. This is the farm system of the alluvial valleys 
and great plains of Portugal : in the mountainous 
regions, where there is continuous pasture, the people 
are shepherds or herdsmen ; in the extreme South, 
orchards of the carob tree and the fig form no 
small proportion of the farmer's wealth ; in the 
marshy, sea-bordering land, rice is grown. Olives 
afford him good return everywhere but in the North, 
and chestnut trees give him a precarious food crop — 
and the best timber in Europe — everywhere but in 
the extreme South. In almost every corner of the 
kingdom the vineyard is an essential part of the farm. 
The passing traveller through many broad tracts 
of Central and Southern Portugal, if he be acquainted 
with farms and farming in some of the countries 

troublesome at all to the virtual owner of the estate, and to dis- 
charge something of the functions of a useful police in the interests 
of the community generally, as against wasteful and detrimental 
farmers. 

Existing tenures are otherwise only affected by the Code in in- 
significant details, with this important exception, that whereas the 
tenure by emphyteusis might formerly be limited to one or more 
lives, the choice of a successor either residing in the holder or 
restricted by some clause in the original deed, or else the right of 
presentment to the holding of the estate being in the lord's gift 
(in which case the tenure constituted a simple tenancy for lives), 
by the present law both lord and tenant are deprived of any such 
right of nomination, and the estate becomes a purely hereditary 
one, subject to the succession above described. By this reform 
many ancient estates of most complicated tenure have been brought 
into the category of simple emphyteutic estates, to the great advan- 
tage of the country and of individuals. 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 173 

of Southern Europe, where over-taxation and ill- 
government have crushed the spirit of the toilers on 
the land, will find much in these portions of Portugal 
to remind him of such thriftless and unprofitable 
cultivation. It is not till he crosses the Tagus on his 
way northward that he will find some signs of at least 
more energetic farming in the western corner of the 
province of Estremadura. As he passes the boundary 
line of the Beira province, cultivation sensibly im- 
proves ; but it is not till he finds himself on the 
north of the Eiver Douro that he will see a land of 
small farms tilled like well-kept gardens, luxuriant 
crops in summer and winter, and a gaily dressed, 
thriving and contented peasantry. Yet it is a land 
where there is no Poor Law, no large estates, no 
squire justices, no high' farming, no agricultural 
machinery, no resident landlords, and not even an 
occasional rich and educated parson to take the 
squire's place in a parish. Notwithstanding all these 
serious disadvantages, this small province is so thickly 
peopled, and its people so prosperous, that if ever our 
own rural districts should come to rear so dense a 
population of the same sort the production of our 
looms and iron works would have to be doubled and 
trebled to supply them, and we could any day put 
an army into the field to match the armed hordes of 
Continental Europe. 

It is not probable that any other mode of holding 
the land would have resulted in the same agricultural 
activity and well-doing as now prevails in the 
provinces of the Minho, under the tenure by emphy- 



174 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

teusis. The hilly nature of the ground and its 
necessary subdivision into small farms ; the abun- 
dance of water of irrigation ; the constant care which 
is required not only in its application to the land, but 
in the construction and reparation of tanks, water- 
wheels, and channels ; the watchfulness necessary to 
uphold the farmers' rights and to prevent encroach- 
ments ;— all these are circumstances under which the 
profitable tillage of the land can be accomplished 
only by small farmers, and by them only if their wits 
and industry be sharpened by actual ownership of 
the soil they till. The self-reliance, the perseverance, 
and the providence of these independent yeomen are 
qualities probably not resulting entirely from the 
nature of the tenure, but also from the long training 
of successive generations, during which they have 
slowly won their present rights and standing. 

Emphyteusis is, as I have said, the largely pre- 
dominating tenure of Northern Portugal. Being so, 
its influence very perceptibly extends beyond the 
parties interested in the emphyteutic tenure. It is the 
standard tenure of this portion of the country, and 
it has certainly modified the relations of landholder 
and landworker everywhere. When listening to the 
conversation of the tenantry of the Minho and the 
Beira, whether they be leaseholders or metayers, it is 
impossible not to be struck by the good sense and 
moderation of their opinions on matters connected 
with their relations to those above and below them. 
Without drawing any comparison with the not un- 
common spirit of bitterness both of the landlord and 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 175 

tenant classes, where the latter can never hope to 
occupy his landlord's position, as is the case in some 
of the southern provinces of Portugal, I may at least 
express my opinion that the little distance which 
separates the worker upon the land from the owner 
of it is a powerful promoter of sympathy in either for 
the difficulties and responsibilities of the other. 

Farming in Northern Portugal is almost ex- 
clusively on a small scale, limited by the small size of 
the estates ; and the general reproach against small 
farming — that it is unprogressive — applies truly to 
this part of the country. Farms of fifty acres are 
uncommon ; those of from five to fifteen acres are 
probably the average size in the Minho ; and here a 
a difficulty presents itself at the outset in writing 
upon the farm system of Portugal, in this, that no 
measure of the land itself is ever adopted, and 
therefore no ready means exist of comparing its 
powers of production with those of other countries. 
The value of a farm is determined, not by its rent, 
for from the nature of the common tenure, rent has 
ceased to be a measure of value ; nor by its acreage, 
for land without water of irrigation bears no com- 
parison in value with similar land possessing it ; but 
by the number of cartloads of Indian corn, or, in 
mountainous districts, of rye, which the whole of it 
can produce in average years. 

The implements and tools in general use are 
ploughs of two sorts, harrows, a broad, heavy hoe 
(which takes the place of a spade), a smaller one for 
weeding, and a small reaping-hook, which is used 



176 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW, 

indifferently to cut grass and to reap the various 
grain crops. 

The ploughs differ very little from the old Eoman 
type, and the description of the implement left by 
the Latin writers applies very nearly to the simpler 
and smaller of the two kinds now used by the 
Portuguese. This plough consists of a beam, body, 
share and sole, with, as a rule, only one stilt. There is 
neither coulter nor mould -board, but the share is 
carried far forward (as in the Kentish turn -wrest 
plough), is lance-shaped, and turned slightly 
downwards. The work of the mould-board is done 
by two upright pegs at the heel of the plough, 
which pegs press out the soil on either side. The 
whole plough can easily be carried afield on the 
shoulders of a labourer. It works only four or five 
inches deep, and stirs the soil in parallel, open 
furrows ; and where the land is light and crumbling, 
as is generally the case, this slight working of it 
would seem to be sufficient. The other plough 
employed is a modification of the smaller and 
simpler one. It has two stilts, one or two wheels, a 
low double mould-board instead of the upright pegs, 
and occasionally (when it is required to turn over 
a furrow slice) a broad coulter is inserted in a hole 
in the beam, which works behind the point of the 
share, and serves to invert the slice, its inclination 
being changed at the end of each furrow ; but the 
Portuguese ploughman has often no occasion to alter 
his turn-furrow, being given to the bad practice of 
driving a curved furrow from the boundary of the 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 177 

field, and continuing it circularly to the centre till 
the whole field is ploughed. This plough will work 
as deep as seven or eight inches. The fields are so 
small and so irregular in shape, and the ground as a 
rule so easily worked, and, again, the whole surface 
cultivated by each proprietor so limited, that it 
would be difficult to persuade a Minho farmer that 
a plough which only costs him twelve or fourteen 
shillings, which he can repair himself with very little 
expense, and whose use he perfectly understands, 
is less suited to him than a more perfect and 
complicated instrument of five or six times the 
cost. 

The harrow is also of the rudest construction, 
having fifteen to twenty teeth of iron or wood set 
quincunx fashion into a strong, oblong-square, 
wooden framework with two cross-bars. Eollers are 
unknown, but as a substitute the harrow can be 
reversed and weighted with stones, and then drawn 
sledgewise over the land. 

The hoe is indispensable in Portuguese field- 
husbandry. The larger kind is a flat piece of iron, 
shaped like and two-thirds as long as an English 
spade, fixed at a slightly acute angle upon a long 
handle. It is used in earthing up maize, in planting 
field-cabbages, in making and altering water-courses, 
and in supplementing imperfect ploughing. It is 
worked with a skill that no labourer used to the 
different movements required by a spade could 
probably attain to. Ground can be prepared by it 
for seeds or for planting more quickly than it can be 

N 



178 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

dug by a spade, although the soil is less completely 
stirred and turned over. 

The clumsiest of all Portuguese tools is the mowing 
or reaping hook ; which, as the cattle are mostly stall 
fed, is in constant use. It is in shape a short segment 
of a circle, of which the arc is about a foot in length ; 
the edge is serrated and very sharp, and the hook can 
be used to cut grass not more than five inches high, 
the tuft of grass being grasped in the left hand and 
the edge of the reaping-hook being drawn against the 
stems. The work of cutting grass is exceedingly slow, 
and a man cannot cut more than half a rood in a day's 
work. 

The cart used throughout modern Portugal is, like 
the plough, a modification of the old Eoman type ; 
two low wheels of solid wood, without spokes and 
with iron tires, are fixed immovably to an axle which 
revolves with them. The body of the cart is com- 
posed of four or five boards laid flat and resting on 
two supports, whose lower sides are grooved where 
they rest on the axle. Straw or grass is retained on 
the flat table formed by these boards by six or more 
movable upright poles, fitting into iron-bound sockets 
at the sides and corners of the table-like boards, the 
centre board being prolonged forwards into a strong 
pole, to which the oxen are harnessed. In carrying 
stones, earth or grain, a thick, wattled, and flexible 
hurdle about thirty inches high is fixed, in horse- shoe 
shape, upon the table of the cart inside the uprights ; 
the opening behind is closed with a board. The 
whole cart is enormously strong, and the separation 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 179 

of the wheels and axle from the body allows it to 
stand the shocks and joltings of roads which are often 
little more than watercourses on the steep sides of hills. 

The yoke is fixed to the necks of the oxen ; in 
some parts of the country — the most hilly — to their 
horns, and when so fixed a leather cushion takes off 
the pressure from the foreheads of the animals. 

The cattle are a small and beautiful variety of the 
dun-coloured breed found in most parts of the Penin- 
sula. In this country they are bred for draught rather 
than for meat, and therefore their points are not such 
as an English grazier would approve. The oxen average 
fifty-two inches in height at the shoulder, and twelve 
hundredweight in live weight, when three-parts fat ; 
but they reach sixteen and sometimes eighteen 
hundredweight. They are compact in shape, with 
deep and most powerful shoulders, sturdy legs, and 
carry straightish horns of great width. Their strength, 
hardiness, quickness, docility, and great beauty of 
shape and colour, are generally appreciated by 
observant persons accustomed to the working cattle 
of other countries. Both cows and oxen are used for 
draught purposes. The beef is close-grained and good. 

The sheep of the Minho, and of the lowlands of 
Northern Portugal generally, are the worst in the king- 
dom ; one or two sheep often live with and follow the 
farmer's small herd of cows and oxen, but flocks are 
hardly ever seen, except in the mountainous districts. 

The breed of pigs is said to be improving ; it has 
still, however, all the marks of a neglected race — 
length of leg, largeness of bone, and coarseness of 

N 2 



180 



PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 



bristle. They fatten very slowly, as a rule. Here 
and there a good breed has been produced by a cross 
with the Chinese race ; at Barroso, in the North, an 
excellent breed is to be found, and another is abun- 
dant on the plains of the Alemtejo. 

The system of tillage in Portugal varies so greatly 
from the processes of agriculture adopted in Northern 
Europe, that a clearer perception of this variation will 
be given by a comparative calendar of farming opera- 
tions in England and Portugal than by any long de- 
scription of the divergences between the two systems. 



England. 



Portugal. 



January, 



Hauling manure ; ploughing 
of grass leas for wheat or oats : 
of stubbles for crops and beans. 



In this month the maize 
fields reaped in autumn are 
either lying fallow, or, having 
been sown with artificial grasses, 
are mown throughout the winter 
for the cattle. 



February. 



Wheat, bean, and pea sow- 
ing; preparation of ground for 
green crops. 



Sowing of all corn crops, ex- 
cept rice, maize, and rye. The 
pruning and tying of vines 
should end this month. 



Sowing corn crops, grass 
and clover seeds, vetches, peas, 
beans, and parsnips; rolling of 
wheat. 



March. 

Sowing of com as in Feb- 
ruary ; and breaking up grass 
leas for maize sowing in follow- 
ing month ; planting potatoes. 



April. 



Finishing the sowing as 
above; sowing carrots, mangel 
wurzel, cabbage seeds in beds, 
flax, lucerne, etc. 



horse-hoeing 



wheat, etc. ; planting potatoes. 



Sowing maize, kidney beans, 
gourds ; planting Galician cab- 
bages in maize fields. Hay- 
making on a very small scale. 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 



181 



England. 

May. 

Preparing land for turnips ; 
hoeing growing crops, etc. 



Portugal. 



Sowing of maize continued ; 
hoeing of early-sown maize 
fields. 



June. 



Sowing first swedes and 
then turnips ; transplanting cab- 
bages; mowing clover and 
vetches. Early hay-making. 



Harvest of barley, oats, rye, 
wheat, and broad beans ; hoeing 
and thinning of maize ; men en- 
gaged daily in the maize fields, 
putting on water of irrigation, 
etc. ; cutting serradella, clover, 
and plaintain for stall-feeding. 



July 
Turnip-sowing; hay-making; 
cutting beans and peas. 



Corn harvest. 



Continuation of harvest of 
all cereals, except maize, which 
requires constant attention wher- 
ever water is available; field 
onions gathered. The male flower 
of the maize is gathered. 



August. 

Work in maize fields as in 
July. 



September. 



Clearing of and ploughing 
up stubbles for winter wheat; 
sowing Italian rye grass, winter 
vetches, etc. 



Harvest of early-sown maize; 
of rice; vintage. 



October. 



Winter wheat and bean sow- 
ing ; ploughing land 
spring sowing. 



Harvest of maize, and vin- 
tage, continued; ploughing of 
stubble and sowing of winter 
barley, rye, and wheat; also 
sowing of rye-grass, with rye 
and barley, for winter forage; 
harvest of kidney beans ; plant- 
ing of kidney beans; planting 
of Galician and other cabbages. 



182 



PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 



England. 



Portugal. 



November. 



Root harvest ; ploughing up 
of stubbles and leas. 



Sowing of broad beans, win- 
ter wheat, rye, etc. ; men busy 
on the threshing-floors and in 
the barns ; vine pruning, begun 
in end of October, throughout 
the month and next three; olives 
gathered in this and following 
month. 



December. 



Hauling manure and thresh- 



ing. 



Sowing of rye, etc., as in 
November; hauling manure out, 
and threshing. 



The chief feature of the lowland tillage of the 
greater part of Portugal is the growth of maize, to 
which all other culture is made subservient. In deep, 
well-manured and irrigated land, maize will produce 
from twenty to fifty imperial bushels of a grain of a 
value averaging that of barley, about a ton of forage 
in early summer, and from half a ton to a ton of most 
nutritious and excellent straw food. The same acre 
of ground on which maize is grown likewise produces 
dwarf beans and gourds — about two to five bushels of 
the former, and from one to three tons weight of the 
latter to the acre. So productive a crop, which in land 
well-manured and with water of irrigation available 
would seem to be producible year after year without 
exhaustion of the soil, is a temptation to ignore any 
system of rotation whatever ; consequently, during the 
five hottest months of every year, the ground is occu- 
pied with this corn. I shall presently show how it is 
that this apparent flying in the face of all received agri- 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 183 

cultural doctrine is chiefly the result of the consump- 
tion on the farm of all the straw it grows and the use 
of gorse as litter. 

Maize can be sown as early as March in this lati- 
tude, but it is profitable to put off the ploughing up 
of grass leas — which are then in full production — 
till as late as possible. The middle of April is the 
average date for sowing, but seed-time may be de- 
ferred till the 15th or 20th of May, or even later. The 
seed is sown broadcast, after one or more ploughings 
with the larger kind of plough ; if the land has been 
manured for a previous autumn crop of artificial 
grass, no manure (or but little) is put in at seed-time ; 
but if not, a very liberal allowance of well-fermented 
cow- dung, sometimes as much as thirty tons to the 
acre, is put upon the land. 1 The manure is spread upon 
the unbroken lea, and covered in at once by a deep 
ploughing. The land then undergoes some amount 
of clearing and levelling with the hoe, which clears 
away the surface weeds ; in some cases it is harrowed 
before sowing, but oftener not. The seed (from six 
pecks to two bushels per acre) is then sown broadcast, 
and harrowed in. With each bushel is mixed a 
quart or so of some kind of dwarf kidney-bean, and 
about half as much gourd or melon seed. The beans 
and gourd plants appear before the maize. It is usual 
to hoe the maize plant when the fourth leaf-spike 
shows, and about twenty days afterwards the earth is 
drawn round the plants ; from this time forward they 

1 The manuring is repeated every year, but not every year to 
this extent. 



184 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

are thinned out for cattle feed. When the male 
flower has arrived at its full perfection it is broken 
off, within about eighteen inches of the top of the 
stem, and used as a food for cattle. Irrigation 
wherever available is freely employed, as soon as the 
plant has depth of root enough to stand the wash of 
the water, and until the whole plant begins to show 
yellow. The cobs are cut when the husks are quite 
dry and when the seed feels hard beneath it ; and 
the less critical operation of cutting the straw is often 
delayed if the weather be wet. The operation of 
husking is often made the occasion of a feast — a kind 
of harvest-home, where wine and dried fish and bread 
are given by the farmer, and large parties of the 
peasantry assemble and work far into the night, to 
the music of guitars and violins. 

The husked cobs are dried in the sun on the 
threshing-floor, and in a fortnight or less are ready 
for threshing out, which is the universal mode in this 
country of getting out the grain. The straw when 
cut is left in stooks in the fields till it is dry enough 
to carry home. 

It is clear that this whole system is open to 
several grave objections ; many of them, however, 
are incident to and inevitable in the nature of small 
properties. The mixture of several crops in one field 
has always been considered a fault in farming. In 
the case of the Portuguese farmer, it is the result of 
some amount of forethought ; being too poor to risk 
his whole income on a single crop, he calculates that 
when he loses part of his corn in a dry year he gets 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 185 

a larger return of beans, and that a year favourable 
to neither may give him a good crop of gourds. 
His sacrifice of some of his maize crop is therefore a 
rough kind of insurance against a total loss of it. 
The apparent waste of seed is required to allow of 
enough young plants being thinned out for the early 
summer food of his stock. The great amount of 
labour required in hoeing the land is a serious draw- 
back to the system ; but in a country of small pro- 
prietors, of small farms and capitals, and of small en- 
closures, it would be of far less advantage to replace 
manual labour by drills and horse-hoes than in such 
a country as the United States, and the cheapness of 
labour in some degree compensates for the amount of 
it required. 

Imperfect preliminary cultivation of the soil is 
perhaps the worst point of the Portuguese system, 
and this also is, to some extent, excused by its friable 
condition and its comparative cleanness. 

With the last hoeing of the maize, rye-grass is 
sometimes sown, from which a first cutting is taken 
in October or November ; but it is more usual to 
spread the maize fields, in September, with all the 
manure which can be got, and to sow rye-grass, 
mixed with either oats, barley, or rye, 1 or more 
frequently these three corns together, on the manure 
itself, and then to plough in with the smaller of the 
two ploughs. This very wasteful and slovenly 
method of producing an artificial grass field, never- 

1 The classical scholar may care to be reminded that this is 
identical with the farrago of the ancient Roman agriculturists. 



186 POETUGAL : OLD AND NEW. " 

theless, generally results in an abundance of green 
food throughout the winter and spring. The rye 
yields a first cutting in about five weeks, and a 
second very abundant one is obtained from all the 
plants jointly at Christmas time ; but the uncertain 
depth at which the seed is covered, some being left 
bare and some buried too deep for germination, causes 
much loss of ground and labour, if the weather be 
either very dry or very wet at seed-time. 

It is a constant practice in Portuguese husbandry 
to plant cabbages in the maize-fields. When this 
corn is sown in spring-time, a labourer cuts a cleft in 
the ground with a single downward stroke of a broad 
hoe. He holds the hoe in the ground till an assistant 
has placed two young cabbage-plants one at each 
corner of the cleft ; the hoe is then removed, and the 
earth pressed down. The men walk in a straight line 
across the field, planting two cabbages at every 
second pace, and then trace similar parallel rows, 
twelve or fifteen feet apart, till the whole field 
is finished. In the heat of summer, and when 
shaded by the growing maize, the cabbage plants 
make little progress ; but when the corn is reaped, 
and the field manured and ploughed for its crop of 
grass, the cabbages grow rapidly, and throughout the 
winter afford a constant supply of leaves for house 
use, and for feeding cows and pigs, and even sheep. 
The cabbage used for this purpose is a large variety 
of the cabbage known at home as the ' Jersey cabbage,' 
and by the French as the Chou Cavalier. It grows 
to the height of six feet or more, if allowed to attain 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 187 

to its full size. The two lower leaves are picked off, 
week after week, till the whole plant is cut down in 
spring, to allow the soil to be again prepared for the 
maize crop. It is the presence of the rows of cabbage 
in the maize stubbles that makes it necessary to use 
the small plough, and to work the land so that the 
plants may not be disturbed. After the plough has 
done what work it can, the untouched ground in the 
line of the cabbages is turned over with the hoe. 

Eoot crops are of little importance to the Portu- 
guese farmer. The porous soil would suit the culti- 
vation of turnips admirably, but not the heat and 
dryness. They are grown, but on principles and with 
results unknown to the British farmer. A common 
way of growing them is to sow them upon the maize 
stubble with rye grass ; the roots are never hoed, and, 
entangled and obstructed by the grass, seldom exceed 
a large apple in size. Again, they are sometimes 
sown after onions, as I shall presently show, and with 
fair success. Where, owing to bad seasons or bad 
cultivation, the roots do not swell, it is common to let 
the turnips run to flower, and a cutting is obtained of 
the leaves and flower-stems in January and February. 
Eape or mustard seed would probably be better suited 
for this purpose, but I have seen neither used. 

Potatoes find but a small place in the simple 
system of Portuguese agriculture. Till lately they 
formed no part of the general food of the people, are 
not used for cattle feeding, and are seldom grown at 
all, except in gardens or near towns. The same 
applies to carrots, mangel wurzel and parsnips, the two 



188 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

latter of which I have never seen growing in a field 
in Portugal. 

Wheat is the predominant cereal of the provinces 
to the south, where large fields and a stiff soil are 
commoner than in the north. Its cultivation in the 
north is adopted sometimes in rotation with maize, or 
on soils too dry for the latter and too stiff for rye, or 
when manure is not forthcoming for the maize crop. 
The small farm system does not, as may be supposed, 
favour the cultivation of wheat, and the crops are 
seldom good. To judge by their appearance on the 
ground, I should consider twenty imperial bushels to 
be an average crop of wheat in these provinces. 
Winter wheat is sown from November to the end of 
January ; spring wheat from January to March ; both 
kinds are reaped in June and July. I have noticed 
seven or eight varieties of wheat, mostly the bearded 
kinds. Hard wheat and soft are in about equal 
proportions. Eed wheat is, so far as I have observed, 
unknown, probably owing to the absence of strong 
dark clays, to influence the colour of the skin of the 
grain. 

Broad beans are rather a garden than a field crop, 
and the early sowing which the climate allows is very 
favourable to their growth. They are sown broadcast, 
and their cultivation is the same as in Great Britain. 
The sort used is, I believe, only a very large variety 
of the common horse-bean. 

Much more important and extensive objects of 
cultivation are the different kinds of kidney beans 
(Phaseolus vulgaris), of which I have counted six chief 



FARMING AND FAEM PEOPLE. 189 

sorts of the dwarf variety, and four of the climbing 
sort. Of the dwarf kidney beans, the small white, 
the striped black and yellow, the brown, the dark 
yellow, the mottled, the grey and the black beans, all 
differ considerably, not only in flavour and productive- 
ness, but in the soils they require and the greater or 
less luxuriance of the plant ; thereby enabling the 
farmer to grow the particular kind most suited to the 
soil and exposure of each field. The chmbing beans 
are less used ; the large white, the common scarlet- 
runner, a brown and red mottled kind, are all grown, 
— sometimes on sticks, but oftener on the stems of 
the taller kinds of maize. The chmbing sorts all 
require a richer soil than the dwarf beans. 

The chick-pea (Cicer arietinum) is less cultivated 
in the northern than in the southern provinces of the 
kingdom, where it is an important part of human 
food ; it is sown in autumn, and does well on light, 
dry and sandy soils. I need hardly say that it is 
identical with the garbanzo of Spain. 

I have already described the cultivation of these 
various plants in describing that of maize, and the 
same remark applies to the gourd. Besides these 
plants, the lentil, the lupine, and the grey field-pea 
are all grown : the lupine very commonly for its seed 
and likewise as a green manure ; the lentil less fre- 
quently ; and the field-pea very seldom. 

The gourd and the tall cabbage together may be 
said to take in Portuguese farming the important 
place of root crops generally in the English farming 
system. It is difficult to compute the yield of the 



190 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

gourd by the acre, for the ground is never exclusively 
occupied by them ; but it is probable that in a richly 
manured soil with water of irrigation, a weight of 
sixty or seventy tons might be raised to the acre, — 
about double the weight of a good crop of swedes. 
Three or four very well marked species are grown ; 
the largest is the round, smooth kind (a variety of 
Cucurbito pepo), which I have seen grown in a field 
to the weight of two hundred pounds. The long, 
yellow, and striped sorts are, I believe, varieties of a 
different species (C. citruUus), and are those commonly 
employed. 

The gourd is left on the ground for a fortnight or 
more after the maize is carried, and in that short 
time greatly increases in size with full exposure to 
sun and air. 

For cattle and pigs, gourds are a most valuable 
winter food, and they also enter largely into the con- 
sumption of all classes of the people. They keep 
sound, in dry years, till the end of February, and are 
not injured by sun or rain if kept standing in a dry 
place ; it is usual, therefore, to lift them to the roofs 
of low buildings, along the tops of walls, or to leave 
them standing on rocky ground, whence they are re- 
moved as they are required for use. 

Melons and water-melons are objects of field cul- 
tivation in Portugal, chiefly the latter species. The 
kinds mostly grown are the cantalupes and the com- 
mon green smooth-skinned sort, and more rarely the 
musk melon. The melon is not grown with other 
crops, but by itself, in land ridged up with shallow 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 191 

furrows eight or ten feet apart. A rich soil, a dry 
atmosphere, and water of irrigation in dry seasons, 
produce very large crops. Water-melons are grown 
on the same system, and give a less precarious and a 
larger return than the sweet melon, and their abun- 
dance and cheapness allow of their very common use 
by the peasantry. 

Of the various artificial grasses and forage plants, 
only a small choice offers itself to the farmer of the 
Minho and of the maize-growing district generally ; 
of these, rye-grass is by far the most commonly used. 
The object of the farmer being to leave the ground 
in the occupation of such plants for as short a time 
as possible, he sows oats, barley, and rye in autumn, 
as I have already mentioned, solely for the sake of 
the two or three cuttings to be got from them ; the 
rye-grass, coming later, gives at most two or three 
more cuttings in the spring. In damp soils the 
narrow-leafed plantain (Plantago lanceolata) is sown 
early in spring or in autumn, and affords frequent 
cuttings of a rich cattle food in early summer, the 
time when herbage is scarcest with the Portuguese 
farmer. It is sometimes left in the ground through 
the winter in land subject to overflow or inundation, 
and it is often grazed as well as cut. 

The common meadow soft grass (Holcus lanatus) 
is often grown in precisely the same way ; it affords 
a more abundant but not so good a herbage. 

A leguminous plant of very frequent use is the 
serradella {Omithopus perpusillus)^ a plant which is, I 
believe, untried in England, but which was introduced 



192 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

into Germany abont twenty years ago. The plant is 
annual, grows in sandy soil, but prefers a deep, sandy 
loam, where it will grow to nearly the height of a 
yard. It is sown in autumn, hardly shows above 
ground till Christmas, and affords one good cutting 
in May or June, in time, in favourable years, for the 
sowing of the maize crop. Eed and Italian clover 
are grown very much in the same way. 

Millet (Panicum italicum) is grown as a herbage 
plant. It is one of the few plants which can be sown 
with advantage at midsummer, and it is often made 
to follow rye or even wheat. It is usually cut before 
the seed has ripened, or, as often occurs when late 
sown in this climate, when the grain has formed, but 
ripened imperfectly. It is made into hay which has 
probably about the value of good meadow-hay — that 
is, three times that of wheat or barley straw. 

It is to be observed of the climate of Portugal (as 
of most of the climates of Southern Europe) that 
winter and spring are the seasons when grass fields — 
natural and artificial — are at their best; and, where- 
as in Great Britain the farmer is most pinched for 
sheep and cattle feed in early spring, having con- 
sumed his roots, and his pastures being still bare, the 
farmer in Portugal is at this season better provided 
with forage than at any other time of the year. 

I have now given some account of the various 
crops which make part of the regular system of. 
tillage in the maize-growing portions of Portugal. 
Two other plants are extensively grown, but both 
are accessory to the general farming routine of the 



FAIttHXG AND FARM PEOPLE. 193 

district — flax and onions : flax principally for home 
consumption, and onions for exportation to England 
and Brazil. 

Wherever good, light, alluvial soil occurs along 
the banks of rivers and elsewhere, the flax plant is 
found growing, mostly in patches, but sometimes 
in great breadths. The farmers in the north of the 
province of the Minho — a chief centre of flax 
cultivation — speak commonly of two distinct species, 
the Gahcian and the Moorish ; the first of these 
being the plant cultivated in the country from time 
immemorial, the latter said to have been brought 
about sixty years ago from Northern Africa. The 
Moorish flax — perhaps Linum perenne — is a taller 
plant, with a stronger and coarser fibre ; the Galician 
is under the average size of flax grown in England, 
and not of fine quality. The Gahcian is the sort 
chiefly cultivated : it is sown in the last fortnight in 
April, and is pulled in July, having been from two 
to three months in the ground. The Moorish flax is 
sown before winter, and is taken up a month earlier 
— that is, in June — after remaining in the ground 
about seven months. 

Great care is used in the preparation of the soil 
for both kinds. It is often ploughed three times ; 
all weeds, stones, etc., are picked out ; and for the 
spring (or Gahcian) flax the ground is lightly dunged 
with well rotted manure. This kind of flax is like- 
wise irrigated ; but the Moorish flax is neither 
manured nor irrigated, and a richer and deeper 
description of soil is required for its production. 

o 



194 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

The Galician is steeped in river water for about 
eight days, the Moorish variety nearly double that 
time, according to the temperature of the air. The 
flax is in some cases steeped again for two or three 
days after it has been taken out and dried. 

Some portion of the flax grown by the smaller 
farmer is broken and skutched by hand ; but in most 
cases both these operations are done in a mill worked 
by mules or oxen, one of which mills is usually kept 
in every village in flax-growing districts. The final 
preparation, or heckling > is usually done by women 
in workshops in the larger villages and towns. 

The flax produced in Northern Portugal is con- 
sumed in the country. 

Oporto is the chief port of exportation for the 
large variety of onion which is known in trade as the 
Spanish or Portugal onion. Its cultivation is quite 
an agricultural operation, and is managed as follows. 
In the month of October the seed is sown in a 
sheltered spot in very well manured seed beds. In 
about ten days the plants appear, are watered 
in dry weather, weeded, and the surface occasionally 
stirred with a sharp pointed stick. The young 
plants, not subjected to any severe frost (for the 
thermometer very seldom falls below thirty-five 
degrees of Fahrenheit), enjoy an uninterrupted 
growth till springtime. In March they are taken up, 
being then some five to eight inches in height, and 
planted from nine to twelve inches apart, in furrows 
made by the hoe in well-ploughed and harrowed 
land. The furrows are filled to the depth of three 



FAKMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 195 

or four inches with well-rotted manure, with which 
the roots of the young plants are placed in actual 
contact. A very essential condition of the successful 
cultivation of the onion is water. The abundant 
and timely irrigation of the growing crop requires 
great and constant care. After transplanting, the 
crop has two or more hoeings and weedings. With 
the last weeding are sown, either white turnips, 
maize, or, more rarely, grass seeds. The onion crop 
is off the ground in August, and sometimes in July. 

The stolen crop of maize so obtained grows 
rapidly in the enriched soil, and often produces as 
large a crop as the spring-sown fields. The turnips 
grown after onions are pulled in December and 
January ; and although the roots are left far too 
near together, they are the only instances I have ever 
seen in this country of fairly well grown turnips. 

Although irrigation, as in most southern countries, 
has so very important a share in the success of farm 
operations in Portugal, yet the configuration of the 
land, the absence of extensive plain country at a 
lower level than an unfailing water supply in the 
uplands (as is the case in Lombardy), the want of 
long, fertile valleys connected with lakes, or ac- 
cessible highland rivers (as in Southern Spain), have 
stood in the way of any general system of canaliza- 
tion for irrigating purposes in Northern Portugal. 

The water of irrigation is obtained in four dif- 
ferent ways : 

1. By wells sunk into water-bearing strata, 
whence the water is drawn either by a water-wheel, 

o 2 



196 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

worked by oxen and made to lift an endless chain of 
buckets, or by some similar contrivance. 

2. By wells worked by similar machinery and 
sunk near the course of slow-flowing streams. The 
water thus obtained is carried to the interior along 
aqueducts. 

3. By means of weirs, in rivers which have a good 
fall in them, the water of which rivers works flour 
mills in winter, and is carried in summer to irrigate 
fields on a lower level. 

4. By the water of springs, often got by carrying 
adits far and deep into the hills. 

This latter kind of irrigation is far the commonest, 
it is increasing year by year. Water is prospected 
for and mined for in Portugal as silver ore is in 
Nevada. It is slow wealth, but it is sure : the metal- 
liferous lode gives out, but the water flows on, in omne 
volubilis cevum, and the miner who has struck water has 
his profits in perpetuity. Some men have a curious 
gift for water-finding, and scent it out by very faint 
indications. To them a tuft of rushes in the forest, 
the growth of the yellow iris on the mountain side, or 
the purslane and water mints springing up away from 
their accustomed haunts, are signs enough to betray 
the secret underground. Of course many trial shafts 
are sunk in vain, and if one wanders in the lonely pine 
forest which covers so many leagues of Northern 
Portugal, one is for ever coming upon these forgotten 
shafts and air holes, dangerous pitfalls, bramble- 
covered, into which men have been known to slij) 
unawares, and pass hours calling in vain to the 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 197 

hawks and woodpeckers, till some chance charcoal- 
burner or woodcutter has come within hearing. In 
these subterranean channels the water is often con- 
veyed for miles to the valley below, and the labour 
expended on these conduits represents a quite in- 
calculable investment of profitable capital. The 
worst of the system is the ease with which a man can 
be undermined and defrauded of his clear-bought 
water. The law courts are filled with disputes as to 
water rights, and the proverb ' Stolen waters are 
sweet ' seems to be one that should have originated 
in this country. 

Irrigation in warm countries is generally under- 
stood in a different sense to the irrigation practised 
on grass lands in Great Britain, where the water 
flows on, over, and off the field. Here it is diffused 
over a larger surface, and the watering which maize, 
onions, and other plants get is equivalent to the 
watering of plants by hand in a garden. The water 
is brought to the roots and sinks in. The porous 
nature of the soil to a considerable depth, the great 
degree of evaporation, and the absence of any water- 
retaining strata near the surface, obviate any sour- 
ness in the land which might result from the presence 
of so much water upon it. I have never seen or 
heard of any description of land drainage in Portu- 
gal (except that by wide, open drains in marsh lands) ; 
and in the prevalent crumbling, decomposed granite 
soil of the North, where the earth only hardens into 
an impervious rock at some yards beneath the 
surface, and in the schisty soils which are as common 



198 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

and as pervious, no kind of drainage would seem to 
be required. 

In Portugal the straw of all cereals enters far 
more largely into the consumption of oxen, horses, 
and mules than in Great Britain. Hay is made in 
the mountainous pasture lands of Traz-os-Montes, 
and on the great hill range of the Estrella, but only 
to a very small extent elsewhere, and the expense of 
carriage is too great to allow of its use beyond the 
district of its production. Of the different straws, 
agricultural chemists assert that 300 pounds of wheat 
straw, an equal quantity of barley straw, 350 pounds 
of rye straw, 280 pounds of oat straw, and only 200 
pounds of maize straw, are respectively equivalent in 
nutritive power to 100 pounds of good meadow hay. 
This calculation of the relative values of the different 
straws more or less corresponds with the experience 
of farmers here, who have incessant practical ac- 
quaintance with the subject. Eye straw is harder 
in this climate even than in England, and is called 
' colmo, or thatch, and the name indicates the use 
which is commonly made of it ; but in the hilly 
districts it is often consumed from necessity in the 
feeding of cattle. Wheat straw is likewise hard and 
dry, and difficult of digestion, but is largely used. 
Barley straw is what is given, in preference to all 
others, to horses, the general prejudice against it in 
Great Britain being unknown here. Oat straw is 
produced only in limited quantities. The straw of 
maize, or rather the dried lily-like leaves of the maize 
plant, for the stem is mostly rejected by cattle, is sup- 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 199 

posed to be unsuitable for horses, and is not often 
used for feeding them. It is, with grass, the chief 
food of milch cows and of fattening and working 
oxen both in winter and summer, and, to judge by its 
obvious effects, and by the high estimation in which 
it is held by Portuguese farmers, it probably exceeds 
the value at which it is put by agricultural chemists. 
JSTow I come to what I believe to be the solution 
of the problem of the continuous corn-cropping of 
the Portuguese farmer. The straw produced on the 
farm is almost exclusively — in most farms entirely — 
consumed as cattle food ; and it is a peculiar and 
marked characteristic of the agriculture of this 
country, that the fodder used in the stabling of 
horned cattle, horses, and pigs is supplied by dried 
gorse, heather, and the various wild plants, such as 
bracken, cistus, rock-rose, bent grass, and wild 
vetches, which usually grow in their company. To 
secure a sufficient quantity of such Utter, most farms 
have attached to them a portion of forest or wild 
land, from which these fodder-producing plants are 
regularly cut every three years, and which forest 
portion is often a mile or more away from the farm- 
yard. In other cases, the farmer enjoys a prescrip- 
tive right to cut as much of them as he chooses from 
the pine forest nearest to him. Of the plants so used, 
gorse is the predominating one, often to the exclusion 
of all others. It is the same species as is found in 
Great Britain ; but the prevailing kind is, I believe, a 
variety of our native gorse, having the prickles 
rather less stronger and the stem less woody. The 



200 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

decaying of manure made with this litter is slower 
than with straw, but the porous wood of the gorse is 
infinitely more absorbent both of gases and of 
moisture, so that the atmosphere of a Portuguese 
stable or cow-byre, is very noticeably purer and 
sweeter than if straw were used, and the standing for 
the beasts is also much drier. It is needless to point 
to the economy of a system by which every particle 
of straw is consumed as food. A second recommen- 
dation is that, while the seeds of the various field 
weeds are not returned to the ground with the straw 
among which they were grown, those which are shed 
by the forest plants, when removed from their native 
soil, find no congenial seed-bed when they fall upon 
cultivated land, and either fail to germinate or fail to 
thrive. The gorse, heather, and other plants which 
compose this litter are cut, or rather scraped up, 
with the broad-bladed hoe, so that moss, creeping 
plants, the decomposing needles of the pine trees, 
dead leaves of trees and shrubs, and the crowns and 
root stock of ferns and wild grasses, all find their way 
together to the farmyard. I know no other country 
where this practice is carried out in a systematic 
manner as in Portugal. The amount of manure pro- 
duced on a small Portuguese farm could not fail to 
strike a Scotch or English farmer ; and the disregard 
by the Portuguese farmer of any system of rotation 
of crops is, as I have said, principally due to the 
abundance of valuable manure at his command. 

The farm-buildings of the smaller proprietors are 
simply but substantially built of squared granite, and 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 201 

the whole lower floor of the house is often used 
for the storing of grain and straw, and sometimes 
even as a stable for cattle. A small yard, kept knee- 
deep in gorse litter, is generally formed by the side 
or two sides of the house, and the building which holds 
the wine-press and cattle byres. High over this yard 
are grown, almost invariably, vines on a heavy wooden 
trellis, and the cattle in the heat of summer find cool- 
ness and shelter under their shade. Outside the 
buildings, well exposed to sun and wind, is the eira, 
or threshing-floor, of slate or granite slabs, to which 
is usually attached a small barn. 

The farmer in Portugal is almost without any 
choice either of natural or artificial manure. Guano 
is hardly known, though its concentrated form and its 
known value in growing maize might seem to recom- 
mend it in a country of difficult communications. 

Along the sea-shore various kinds of sea-weed 
are regularly collected, allowed to ferment and decay, 
and applied directly to the maize crop with good effect. 
A still richer manure is furnished by a small species of 
crab, caught for the purpose in nets in vast quantities. 
At Aveiro and other places, where the coast is marshy 
and intersected by estuaries, inlets, and slow-flowing 
streams, boats are employed in dredging up the ground 
weed, mixed with rich, decaying vegetable matter and 
small shell-fish, from the bottom of these brackish waters, 
to be used as a dressing to the fields in their neighbour- 
hood. These various manures supply valuable phos- 
phates and alkalies,. and to some small extent take the 
place of the artificial manures used in Great Britain. 



202 POETUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

The vine in the Minho district is grown on pol- 
larded oak and chestnut trees, and on trellises. It is 
pruned when the supporting tree is cut back in winter, 
and gets no cultivation but what it shares with the 
crop growing beneath it. The vine strikes its roots 
so far into the soil that it probably does no harm 
beyond the slight injury caused by the shade of its 
dense foliage in summer. The vines give a harsh, 
dark-coloured grape, and the wine is of the kind 
known as Vinho verde, green wine, and rarely keeps 
sound a whole twelvemonth. It is a rough, harsh, 
acid wine, of powerful flavour, and exceedingly dis- 
agreeable to those who are not accustomed to its use. 

The inhabitants of Portugal, or at least of North- 
ern Portugal, are, as I have said, probably homo- 
geneous in race ; but the character of the peasantry, 
their habits and their manners, vary considerably in 
the different provinces, with the difference of their 
condition, which again is generally traceable to their 
circumstances and surroundings. 

The Minhotes are a well-fed, well-clothed, law- 
respecting, courteous people, of a cheerful and sociable 
disposition. They are good and intelligent labourers, 
and make excellent soldiers. On the other hand, the 
character of the inhabitants of some of the mountain 
parts of Beira, and of the more remote pasture 
lands of Traz-os-Montes, is of a more gloomy cast. 
Crimes of violence — agrarian and otherwise — were 
until late years not unfrequent in these districts, and 
often remained unpunished ; and the gravity and 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 203 

reserve of the shepherds and herdsmen of these parts 
contrast strongly with the sociable manners of the 
lowland husbandmen. 

I am disposed to think that the condition of 
the Northern Portuguese peasant generally — exclud- 
ing the dwellers in some of the poorer and more un- 
healthy districts, whose penury and misery are often 
extreme — is, on the whole, superior to that of the 
great average of land-workers in Europe generally. 
A conclusion upon this point, drawn from the 
appearance of the people themselves, can hardly be 
deceptive ; but such an opinion would be supported 
by a closer examination into the system of wages, the 
amount and kind of their food, and the social habits 
generally of the peasantry. 

The mode of hiring labour differs in each province. 
In Estremadura and Alemtejo, and in other parts of 
Portugal where the tenure is allodial, hiring by the 
twelvemonth is common ; and a labourer will earn 
from five to eight pounds a year, with food, housing, 
fuel for cooking, and a coarse woollen cloak given 
him every two years. The wages of labour are slowly 
rising in all Portugal. 

In Beira, and generally throughout the northern 
provinces, hiring for parts of the year is the common 
practice. From three to four or five pounds are 
given for the five months from December to April ; a 
general rehiring then takes place, and a wage of from 
four to seven pounds is earned for the rest of the year, 
to include the hard work of maize-hoeing and harvest 
work in the long days of summer. The contracts are 



204 



PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 



made at the different local fairs held in April and 
December. 

In the Minho, among the small emphyteutic 
yeomen, a curious practice exists (with almost endless 
modification), by which the yeoman proprietors take 
upon their farms a labourer who is paid partly in 
wages, partly in kind, and partly out of the profits of 
the farm. The contract is by its nature so compli- 
cated and so liable to perversion, that without the 
good sense, fairness, and moderation of the labourers 
and peasant proprietors of this part of the kingdom, 
the carrying out of it would be impossible. The 
system seems to work perfectly, and possesses very 
obvious advantages over any mode of simply buying 
labour with money wages. The wages of a day 
labourer, without food, vary from eight to fourteen 
pence throughout the country. 

The fare of the Portuguese peasant is coarse, but 
it cannot be said of it that it is not comparatively 
varied and abundant. The following scale was 
furnished to me by a farmer in the Minho, and is 
probably an average one : — 



Food of three farm servants (two men and a woman) for a week. 



Dried codfish 

Lard . 

Olive-oil 

Rice 

Bacon . 

Bread (of rye and maize) 

Gourds or cabbages 

Olives . 

Wine . 



6 to 7 lbs. 
lib. 
li pint. 
lib. 
lib. 

30 to 40 lbs. 
ad libitum. 
a quart in summer, 
a pint to a quart in summer 
for each person. 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 205 

The national mode of cooking food is in a stew, 
corresponding to the pot-au-feu of the French peasant, 
and of which gourds or cabbages, dried kidney beans, 
rice, beef and bacon, form the ingredients, according 
to means or circumstances. 

Fish is much consumed by the peasantry, and 
dried cod is a favourite and universal food with all 
classes. It is considerably dearer than fresh beef, 
but having been deprived of its moisture and being 
in a concentrated form, it probably possesses superior 
food value. The sardine is another generally used 
food, both fresh and pickled. In the latter state it is 
consumed by the peasant in the remotest districts as 
far as the frontier lines of Spain. 

The sardine is caught in immense quantities along 
the whole coast of Portugal. The sardine of these 
seas is a large variety, approaching in size and, most 
naturalists now affirm, identical in species, with the 
Cornish pilchard. The cod is imported partly from 
Norway, but chiefly from Newfoundland. 

Potatoes are seldom eaten by field labourers, and 
the bread food is broa, a strong, wholesome, and not 
unpalatable bread, composed of maize and rye. The 
universal use in Portugal of a double bread-food is to 
my knowledge a unique circumstance, and one well 
worth the attention of politicians and economists. 
The prejudices of mankind in regard to any change 
of the chief staple of their daily food are, it is known, 
all but insuperable, and it will be within most of my 
readers' recollection that during a recent famine in 
Bengal the Hindoos often preferred starvation to a 



206 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

change in the quality of their rice. A food, therefore, 
composed of two different cereals has certain great 
and important advantages, for the proportions of 
maize and of rye can be altered almost ad libitum 
without much change in the quality or appearance 
of the loaf. 

To the use of this bread-food I believe some part 
of the well-being of the Portuguese peasant may 
fairly be ascribed. He is insured against periodical 
famine, with its many disastrous attendants and con- 
sequences, such as have followed rice famines in India, 
the great potato' failure of Ireland, or even such as 
but for free trade would accompany a wheat scarcity 
in England. An entire failure of the maize crop 
is almost impossible in Portugal. The worst year 
is a very dry, hot one ; and such a season greatly 
stimulates and increases the productiveness of 
those low-lying lands which have an unfailing sup- 
ply of water ; while a very wet year promotes the 
growth of maize in the upland fields. Again, the 
cold summer, unfavourable to maize, suits the rye 
crops, and a comparatively good harvest of this 
corn may be looked for whenever the maize crop is 
bad. 

When maize is scarce and dear, less in proportion 
to the rye can be used in the loaf, and vice versd ; and, 
in point of fact, this adjustment of the proportions of 
the two corns takes place nearly every year and in 
nearly every district. In the maize-producing pro- 
vince of the Minho, and in the lowland districts gene- 
rally, the usual proportions are eight parts of maize to 



FAKMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 207 

one of rye, and in the rye lands among the mountains 
these proportions are almost reversed. 

I like particularly to dwell upon the diet used by 
the Portuguese peasantry because I think it helps to 
make clearer some very important points in econo- 
mics. The peasants are epicures in a way, with many 
multifarious tastes, as I, who have been a Portuguese 
farmer for several years past, very well know. They 
have souls far above the bread, beer and bacon of 
English ploughboys, and claim to have their stew 
cooked fresh three times a day. They are good 
judges of olives and dried cod-fish, and have a pretty 
taste (not our own exactly) in wine. It seems to me 
that this is a very desirable circumstance for them, 
for those they work for, and for the nation at large. 
Nothing astonishes me so much as the indignation of 
some honest and conventional people at home at 
the fact of English working men allowing them- 
selves luxuries which their condition should, in these 
honest people's opinion, forbid their aspiring to. The 
colliers when wages were high ate pate de foie gras 
and drank champagne. How deplorable ! Certainly 
it would have been desirable in the interests of the 
higher culture if they had spent their earnings in 
Eembrandt etchings, well bound books and blue 
china, but on the other hand it would have been infi- 
nitely less desirable if they had struck work altogether 
the moment they had enough to eat. Any taste is 
better than no taste, and surely it is better for a man 
to be knowing in dried codfish and ' green wine ' 
than to know nothing at all. When the negroes of 



208 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

Jamaica have gained a shilling by a few hours' work 
they buy bananas and meal enough to last a iveek, 
go to sleep in the sun, and laugh at the idea of another 
stroke of work till the larder is bare again. The 
champagne of our colliers was surely all in the interest 
of morality, sobriety and hard work : it was an object 
in life. Our farmers in England complain that with 
the better wages of their labourers work is slacker. 
What wonder that it should be? Give them wider 
tastes, and they will do a hard day's work to gratify 
them. The Portuguese peasant likes dainty eating, 
and aspires to wear a gold stud in his white linen shirt 
and a good broadcloth cloak, and to give his sweetheart 
a pair of massive gold earrings. Let no one accuse 
him of effeminacy : he will work hard and cheerfully 
for sixteen hours on a summer's day in the maize-field. 
To be sure he has higher ambition than for good food 
and fine clothes, for he looks to obtaining a slice of 
the land ; and, with health, strong arms, long life, 
a shrewd head and fair luck, the odds are that a day 
labourer in Northern Portugal will live to be a land- 
holder. It is that chiefly, I think, which sweetens 
his sixteen hours' toil under the sun of Portugal. 

The diet question, too, goes for something, and I 
must come back to it. I have taken an opportunity 
lately of saying in public that Portuguese olives are 
pickled when they are fully ripe, and are therefore 
more of a dish and less of a hors d'ceuvre than the green 
olives of France, Spain and Italy. They are neces- 
sarily more fit for human food, and in my opinion far 
better to eat than any other kind of olives. I find 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 209 

that most people who know them agree with me. A 
bad olive-harvest stints the population greatly ; butter 
being almost unknown. Though the olives are 
excellent, the oil is carelessly made and of generally 
inferior quality. 

As for another chief item in the Portuguese pea- 
sant's bill of fare — bacalhau — it is really difficult 
for me (who am yet far from being an optimist) to 
approach this topic in its economic relations without 
seeming to be over enthusiastic. 

Bacalhau is a word and a thing that philologers 
have wrangled about, politicians fought over, finan- 
ciers rejoiced in, merchants contended for, fishermen 
fished for, economists been puzzled about, while the 
Portuguese people generally have quietly eaten it 
with oil and pepper. 

It is still a question with the learned whether the 
word is taken from baculum, the stick with which the 
split and dried fish is kept open, or the Germanic 
word bolch, which means fish. 1 



1 Sebastian Cabot, looking for the North- West passage towards 
North Lat. 67 J°, in the year 1498, noted that 'in the seas there- 
abouts were such multitudes of great fishes, like tunnies, and 
which the natives call Baccalaos, that they sometimes stopped the 
way of the ships.' Dr. Kohl, however, says that the cod fishery 
had existed long before this on the Northern coasts of Europe, and 
the fish were called by the Germanic nations, Cabliauwe or 
Backljau. The word could not therefore have an Indian origin. 
The Portuguese changed it to Bacalhau. Brevoort, on the other 
hand, says, ' it is simply an old Mediterranean or Romance word, 
given to the preserved cod-fish, dried and kept open by the help of 
a small stick, haculum? The Portuguese, I may observe, call both 
the fresh and dried cod-fish Bacalhau. 



210 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

It is not enough to catch the fish, it must be 
brought to land and dried there, and a locus standi 
for the fishermen on the coasts of Newfoundland has 
before now been made an international question. In 
Portugal bacalhau is taxed about three farthings per 
pound, and the finances of the country are helped by 
its consumption to a very considerable extent. Poli- 
tical economists, however, ask whether it be right to 
tax a necessary of life, and social economists whether 
the people themselves do very wisely to eat, as an 
almost daily food, dried fish which costs more by the 
pound than ordinary beef. So much for the grave 
questions that have gathered round the subject of 
bacalhau : it is from the standpoint of its value as a 
food for the people that I wish to regard it. 

If I could persuade my countrymen to use this 
most valuable food as the Spaniards and Portuguese 
do, it is my firm conviction that I should be doing 
more for their material advancement than most 
average patriotic statesmen accomplish in a lifetime. 
Bacalhau when cooked with oil, as it generally is, is 
probably, weight for weight, the richest food, in all the 
life-sustaining elements, of any known to mankind. 
In Portugal it is a luxury as well as a daily necessary. 
I do not know what the poorer classes of this country 
would do if the great shoals of the Newfoundland 
Bank and Fjords of Norway should resolve to swim 
off to the North Pole ; and richer people would be ' 
in as sad a plight. Nobody in Portugal thinks of 
existence as being possible without bacalhau. The 
working man carries a piece of it for his midday 



FARMING AND FAKM PEOPLE. 211 

dinner ; the fishermen take it in their boats out to 
sea — coals to Newcastle one might think ; the rich 
man eats it most religiously on Fridays and fast days, 
and, if he is a gourmet, inconsistently orders it again 
for his feast dinner on Sunday. Lent is shorn of half 
its austerity for good Catholics in the Peninsula ; and 
bolos de bacalhau — the fish minced, made into cakes 
and fried — represents for the middle classes our tur- 
key and roast beef of Christmas Day. 

A rather serious objection to bacalhau as a food 
is that it is not nice to eat — that is, at first — it is an 
acquired taste, like coffee or caviare. The sooner a 
traveller or resident in Portugal acquires it the better 
for him. He might as well travel or live in England 
and not like boiled potatoes, or in Scotland and hate 
oatcakes and bagpipes. 

Bacalhau is cooked in many ways : boiled, made 
into a sort of Irish stew, grilled like Finnan haddocks, 
or clone into the bolos aforesaid. There is always oil 
with it and garlic. Our people might leave out the 
garlic and use butter for oil. 

The Portuguese also eat bacalhau quite raw. I 
have seen them do it out shooting, taking a piece 
from their game bags ; and they seemed to like it. 
The present writer might have expected to finish his 
walk through life without having to eat raw fish, but 
this was not to be. I have read that primitive man 
ate his fish uncooked ; the South Sea Islanders do the 
same, and it has seemed to me a most uncivilized and 
not a pleasant thing to do, but circumstances required 
it of me once when I was travelling in a remote part 

p 2 



212 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

of Portugal, with a companion most properly parti- 
cular, and curious, and learned in the preparation of 
his daily food. 

We were riding, and it was near nightfall ; we 
were excessively hungry, and we had some leagues 
between us and comfortable quarters. We pulled up 
our horses at a small solitary farmhouse, and we 
begged for something to eat. I asked the old woman 
in charge of the house for anything she had ; but the 
larder seemed to be all but empty. 4 Had she white 
bread ? ' I asked. She had none. ' Ham ? Bacon ? ' 
None. ' Meat or chickens ? ' Of course none. ' A 
handful of olives ? or some eggs ? ' There was nothing 
of all these things, but she had something, she hospit- 
ably informed us, better than anything I had inquired 
for. She went to get it, and returned triumphantly 
with the half of a split cod-fish : an object more 
resembling, in colour, size, shape and hardness, a short 
piece of one-inch red deal board than any article of 
human food I was ever before helped to. She 
was a most cheerful and kind and cordial old lady, 
and, as we rode off, each of us with a piece of raw 
bacalhau in our hand, she patted me amicably on the 
arm, and said : ' It is very good for the head. 
Whether this was a subtle parting reflection on our 
want of common sense about raw fish, for we had not 
received it with any show of enthusiasm, or whether 
our hostess only expressed the common belief there is' 
to that effect I know not. It was certainly not in her 
manner to be personal, and now that I think of it I 
remember that physiologists and organic chemists at 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 213 

home believe themselves to have discovered that ' fish 
nourishes the brain.' The savants at home are then, 
so far, in accord with at least one old woman in 
Portugal. It is not, however, on this account alone 
that I should desire to promote the use of bacalhau 
among all classes of my countrymen. It is in its more 
serious aspects as a source of food supply that I wish 
to recommend it. To the house purveyor it should 
be invaluable : a raw material which admits of being 
dressed, if necessary, at a minute's notice, and in so 
many different ways, and which never taints, has 
obvious advantages over every form of animal food. 
Though bacalhau is apparently dearer than beef, it 
is probably cheaper when compared with reference 
to food value, and its price in Portugal is enhanced first 
by the duty, and probably by the fact of the demand 
being, in so small a country, more or less intermittent. 
Distance, too, must lend something to freight-charge. 
If there was a general demand for it in Great Britain 
it would cheapen. If the Portuguese, who are rigid 
economists, find their account in buying bacalhau 
dear, we, if we got to like it, should certainly be no 
losers by buying it cheap and consuming it freely. 

As for the question of supply, it is practically in- 
exhaustible ; the whole Northern ocean, by travellers, 
accounts, teems with cod-fish wherever the water 
shoals enough to get at them. The supply is, there- 
fore, independent of seasons. The pasturage of 
English and American fields determine the price of 
beef and mutton, but the fields of ocean are never 
bare : the cod shoals migrate from time to time, but 



214 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

have never failed. The bringing them to England is 
only a question of capital and enterprise, in which 
our own colonists and countrymen are not likely to 
fail us. 

All, however, depends upon whether we can ever 
get to like cod-fish dried, as we already like it fresh. 
Ce rtest que le premier pas qui coute^ as my friend and 
I found when we debated as to which of us should 
begin on his piece of raw bacalhau. 

Both countrymen and countrywomen are warmly 
and comfortably clad, the women, perhaps, more con- 
spicuously so than the men ; and while the latter have 
in many places adopted the dress of townsfolk (often 
possessing, in addition, a thick cloak of brown home- 
spun cloth), the women still preserve the national 
dress, which varies a little in every district, and 
generally consists of a coarse white linen shirt, a dark 
bodice, a pleated serge or cloth petticoat, and a broad 
flat hat, with a black cloth cloak. The custom of 
wearing ornaments of very fine gold is universal, even 
among the poorer of the peasant women, and the 
value of these ornaments testifies to the present and 
long continued well-being of their wearers. Few 
peasant women have a less value in ornaments than 
one or two pounds ; and I am assured, and can believe, 
that many of them possess gold ornaments worth 
twenty or thirty pounds. 

Women work habitually in the fields, and begin 
to do so as children ; as quite young girls they 
accompany the ox carts, walking in front of. the oxen 
with goads in their hands, while the men follow to 



FARMING AND FAEM PEOPLE. 215 

load and unload the carts ; they drive the cattle afield, 
and mind them while they are grazing. As they grow 
older, they cut and carry home the grass, weed the 
maize and wheat, and do their share of all the work 
of the farm except ploughing and the harder work 
with the hoe. 

The system of field gangs is utterly unknown in 
Portugal. 

While this general employment of women nearly 
doubles the agricultural working-power of the nation, 
the women themselves are certainly neither demoral- 
ized nor physically deteriorated by their labours. 

Such is the farm system in the naturally barren 
but artificially affluent province of the Minho, where, 
I have no hesitation in saying, the general social well- 
being of the tillers of the land is greater than in any 
part of the world I have yet seen. 

When my German acquaintance at the table dlwte 
— for whose benefit and at whose particular request 
I had condensed into a speech which took but a very 
few minutes in the utterance some small portion of 
the information which I have now (I fear with much 
greater prolixity) given to the reader, — when, I say, 
my German friend again spoke, he was somewhat less 
impressed than I should like my reader to be with my 
views. 

' The torrent of human progress,' he said, ; (for it 
is a torrent in these days, and nothing less rapid) 
cannot be restrained by mere sentimental obstacles.' 

I answered, ' In the meantime, and until the full 



216 POETUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

flood of utilitarianism is upon us, I venture to appre- 
hend that you have found few customers for agricul- 
tural machinery in the northern provinces ? ' 

' Very few,' he said ; ' in fact, none at all.' 

' And you will never find customers.' 

' The people of these provinces are little better 
than idiots,' he remarked, ' and do not understand 
their own interests.' 

'I should call them,' I said, ' a shrewd people, and 
so far intelligent that it would be difficult to persuade 
a farmer with twelve or twenty acres of land to give 
as much as the whole yearly profits of his farm for a 
machine that he could never find enough work for.' 

' Humph ! ' said the German. 

' You should go southwards ; there, though the 
labourers are thriftless and slothful, the land ill- tilled, 
and the country poor, you will find at any rate estates 
large enough for expensive machines to do sufficient 
work to pay for the outlay upon them.' 

' I shall go there and try,' said the German. 

The German gentleman remained silent, and I 
hoped he was impressed ; but he presently said, 

' I admit that you have told me something that I 
did not know before ; nevertheless I cannot but think 
that there is a solution for the intellectual, social, and 
moral obstruction which you describe, more in accord- 
ance with immutable general principles and the 
doctrines of the great Smith than you perhaps 
imagine.' 

Here our conversation ceased, with the unspoken 
reflection on my part that very intelligent persons are 



FARMING AND FARM PEOPLE. 217 

sometimes singularly opposed to the reception of new 
opinions ; and when once they have taken in a full 
cargo of information and ideas, are very loth to do 
any further traffic in these commodities. 

I am reminded of a similar limitation in the 
sagacity of the most sagacious of all animals after man 
— the elephant. 

It is related of one of these thoughtful creatures 
that, his keeper failing to feed him sufficiently during 
the day, it was his habit every night to draw the 
heavy wooden post to which he was fastened by means 
of a stout chain, by main force out of the ground, 
and to make his way to a neighbouring rice-field, and 
there, after carefully fixing his post in a convenient 
part of the field — so great was the force of habit and 
association with him — he would proceed to feed upon 
all the rice within reach of his tether. In the morn- 
ing he again drew his post up, and returning to his 
stable, renxed it in its accustomed place. 

I could not but reflect that my German acquaint- 
ance possessed not a little of this rather narrow 
elephantine wisdom ; and he is, I fear, not singular. 
Many and many an intelligent traveller have I met, 
in, as it were, foreign rice fields, carrying his post 
with him, planting it firmly in the ground from time 
to time, and tethering himself thereto, to the very 
lamentable limitation of his outlook upon the world 
around him. 



218 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 



CHAPTEE VI. 



PORT WINE. 1 



If the secret history of many of the utterances on the 
subject of wine that have been made within the last 
thirty years could be made known to the world, the 
world would be singularly astonished at learning 
from whose hands it has been accepting the doctrine 
which it holds with a very firm faith indeed. A man 
writes a learned book, or a popular book, or a long 
review in an influential periodical, or a smart one 
in a newspaper ; or he takes a scientific and seem- 
ingly impartial interest in the digestion of wine con- 
sumers and writes an essay, or he fires off a dozen 

1 I published some years ago in a leading periodical, under the 
transparent pseudonym of Matthew Freke Turner, a paper en- 
titled, Wine and Wine Merchants. This paper I have now re- 
written, with copious additions, into the present chapter. When 
it appeared, many worthy gentlemen, whose interests seemed to 
them to run counter to the facts and conclusions I put forth, 
were made very angry with me, and used strong language in print. 
Much as the original article has been altered to suit its present 
place as a chapter in a book on Portugal, I have been careful to 
take away from it nothing which could have the good effect of 
continuing to irritate and offend the aforesaid interested persons, 
being convinced that one of the most righteous and pleasing func- 
tions of literature is to tell the plain truth, and shame those who 
have any interest in suppressing it. 



PORT WINE. 219 

controversial pamphlets in succession ; and in each 
one of these cases the good, easy public believes 
that the author has no object in view but its instruc- 
tion. 

There are cases, no doubt, in which the writer 
has no other object before him ; and there is, I am 
sure, no case in which he does not believe himself to 
be an impartial instructor of mankind ; nevertheless, 
as human nature is at present constituted, it would 
be reassuring to be quite certain how the writers are 
circumstanced. It would, perhaps, be too much to 
expect that the author of pamphlet, article, essay, 
review, or book should begin by saying, ' I am a 
dealer in the ware I am about to describe,' or ' I am 
the brother, uncle, or intimate friend of some one 
who is, and I am interested in the good repute of cer- 
tain wares that I am about to praise, and in the ill 
repute of certain other wares that, as the reader 
shall presently observe, I shall run down ; ' but I can- 
not recollect a single instance in which such a pre- 
face has been written. 

Now, I am not for a moment going to imply that 
a gentleman who lives by selling one kind of wine, 
say the fine vintages of our Australian Colonies, is 
anything but quite conscientious when he asserts in a 
printed book that Chateau Margaux is poor stuff, and 
Lafitte very much overrated. I only say that he 
is not a fit person to write a book to instruct the 
public. It is, no doubt, a very illiberal ordinance 
that a judge should not sit on the bench in his native 
county, but it recommends itself to the common 



220 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

sense of human nature. As one of a simple-minded 
public, I protest against our having to accept our 
opinions about wine from gentlemen whom a custo- 
mary rule would exclude from the wine committees of 
their London Clubs. 

After saying so much, it is well that the present 
writer should observe that he is not himself pecuni- 
arily interested, directly or indirectly, even in the re- 
motest way, in wine. 

The universal interest that is now taken in wine, 
and consequently the mass of literature dealing with 
the subject, dates from little more than about twenty 
or thirty years ago. When port and sherry were the 
daily drink of English gentlemen, claret and cham- 
pagne not very common ones, and the German wines 
hardly known, there was very little to make a book 
about. The secrets of the trade were also better 
kept ; it was in fewer hands ; the duties were enor- 
mous, and the lighter wines which are now favoured 
by taxation were then so overburthened as only to 
reach a very few rich men. There were few rivalries 
among wine merchants, seeing that wines of each variety 
were the staple of every merchant's trade, and there- 
fore if a man sold claret he did not care to say a bad 
word for his neighbour who sold port, as it is to be 
feared he does now when wine-firms have multiplied 
and, as always happens with an increasing trade, 
businesses have been sub-divided. It was then the 
golden age of wine-dealing, when an innocent and 
unsuspecting public drank over-brandied port, and 



PORT WINE. 221 

' plastered ' sherry, and loaded claret, and paid their 
wine bills, and held their tongues. 

Yet, even in those days of happy ignorance and 
guileless customers, some stir had been made, a panic 
created, and a dead set made against one of the truest, 
best, and safest (I shall explain this word presently) 
of imported wines. A fashionable doctor discovered 
that madeira contained acid in pernicious proportions. 
He was believed, and the Eegent set the example of 
drinking sherry instead. Fear and fashion together 
did their work, and madeira has never regained the 
prestige which it then lost ; while sherry, which had 
before been little used, not only took its place but 
has found greater favour, to judge from the evidence of 
the quantities imported, than any wine, even port, 
has ever had in these islands ; and, be it observed, 
the sherry that superseded madeira was not the light 
white wine which grows on the hills round Xeres ; 
it was not the wine which once was a famous drink 
in England — the 4 Sherris sack ' [Xeres secco) known 
in Shakespeare's time — a dry wine which had to be 
sugared as we sugar tea. 1 It was not this natural wine, 
but a fabricated liquor which took its place, — a wine 
coloured and sweetened Avith burnt sugar and boiled 
must to imitate the flavour of madeira, brandied to 
make it keep, and ' plastered ' (doctored with plaster 
of Paris) to take away the over-acidity. This it was 
that captivated the simple-minded wine-drinker, the 

1 So commonly was this done that, as will be remembered, 
Poins addresses Falstaff as ' Sir John Sack and Sugar,' and that 
worthy remarks piteously, ' If sack and sugar be a fault, God help 
the wicked ! ' 



222 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

absence of sourness. The natural acidity was 
neutralized with an alkali, and became what chemists 
call a 4 salt : ' and as his doctors told him to beware 
of acid, and he was satisfied that there was little of it 
in sherry, he never stopped to inquire whether, in its 
new form, it was possibly not as harmful as before. 
It was enough that he did not taste the sourness ; he 
was no chemist, his palate was his only laboratory. 
Let it be observed that the sherry I thus disparage 
is the sherry of years gone by, of what architects 
would call the transition period — the transition be- 
tween good modern sherry and madeira. Everyone 
knows that good sherry now is a very pure and whole- 
some wine. It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say 
at the present day that this theory of acidity was 
founded on a misconception. 

The various acids in madeira, the free and fixed 
acids, the tartaric, which mostly pre-exists in the 
grape and is in moderation harmless, and the acetic 
acid, which is another name for vinegar and usually 
marks some degree of unsoundness — all these acids 
are found in less proportion than in sound claret, and 
yet claret is admitted, and rightly admitted, to be a 
wholesome wine. In truth madeira was condemned 
on false evidence. On dietetic grounds there is no 
particular reason for its loss of favour, but it is too 
late for a new trial or an appeal from a wrong verdict 
whose justice has so long been acquiesced in. The 
day of madeira has probably gone by, not to return. 

It is to Mr. Gladstone, as everyone knows, that we 



PORT WINE. 223 

owe the change in the wine duties twenty years ago 
which has brought about quite a new state of 
things in the wine trade, and which shook to their 
foundations the thrones of the old established wine- 
fir ins. 

From the year 1703, when Lord Methuen 
concluded his famous treaty with Portugal, which 
admitted Portuguese wines through our Custom- 
house on easier terms than the till then favourite 
wines of Gascony — from that time port wine began to 
be drunk in England, and the wines of France to be 
neglected. It was our subtle British policy to drink 
the wines of our ally, and to eschew those of our 
hereditary enemy. As time went on and anti-Galli- 
canism grew stronger during our wars with France of 
the middle of the century, it was in the wines of 
Portugal and of its colony Madeira that we drank 
success to our arms and confusion to our enemies. 
At the commencement of the present century the 
policy which favoured port wine, and imposed accu- 
mulated duties that came in time to be prohibitive 
on those of France, was more and more approved 
and seconded by the nation, which the abominations 
of the Revolution, and our long struggle with the power 
of Napoleon, had converted almost entirely to high 
Toryism ; so that a patriotic Englishman got to reckon 
it to be one of his privileges and blessings that the 
State had interfered to prevent him from drinking 
claret and to let him fill his glass with port and 
madeira, wines which by this time he had got to like 
beyond all others. 



224 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

Moreover, nature herself seemed to conspire with 
the ruler of France to make the State-favoured wines 
more than ever acceptable to Englishmen. 1 From 
1802 to 1815, inclusive, there was a succession of 
splendid vintages, both in Portugal and Madeira. 
Never before had such wines been made. Most of 
these fourteen vintages were abundant ; all were good ; 
one was the famous 'Comet Vintage,' of 1811 ; and 
the last was the magnificent vintage of 1815, which 
has never been excelled in Portugal. On the other 
hand, the wines made in other parts of the world 
during this period were of indifferent quality, and 
most of the vintages of the Medoc, always excepting 
the ' Comet Vintage,' were bad. But even in this 
last year of its apparent complete triumph, a very 
keen observer of the times might have foreseen the 
eventual weakening of the long-continued bond 
between wine and the State, and that a great politician 
would arise in the future, one of whose titles to fame 

1 I say ' Englishmen ' advisedly. Port was never greatly in 
favour in either Ireland or Scotland. It would be difficult to 
name a period in which good claret was not obtainable in Dublin. 
The Scotch retained, perhaps from their ancient connection with 
France, a strong liking for the wines of Medoc, and the poet did 
not speak the literal truth who rhymed as follows : 

* Firm and erect the Caledonian stood, 

Old was his mutton, and his claret good. 
" Let him drink port ! " the English statesman cried : 

He drank the poison, and his spirit died.' 

There was more rhyme than reason in this doggrel ; and as 
long as a smuggler chose to run a cargo of Gascon wine on Leith 
Sands, Scotchmen were found to drink it in spite of the English 
statesman and his tax. Edinburgh has never lost her old reputa- 
tion for claret. 



PORT WINE. • 225 

would be that he had enabled his countrymen to 
drink the wine of their hereditary foes (at fourteen 
shillings the dozen). For, in this very year 1815 the 
great battle was fought from and after which our 
antipathy to Frenchmen began to lessen, and our 
desire to drink their wines to increase. Then came 
the opening of the Continent, and Englishmen went 
abroad again and found, to their surprise, that there 
were wines fit for an Englishman to drink besides 
port and madeira. Then it so happened that the 
vintages in Portugal, and also in Madeira, for the next 
four years were detestable. Then came an event 
which, little as it might seem to be connected with 
any diminution of the veneration for port wine in 
English breasts, was in truth the ' beginning of the 
end.' I dwell upon this circumstance, because I 
am not aware that it has been so much as mentioned 
in any one of the many works treating of wine. 

The year 1820 is memorable in the chronicles of 
wine as the most remarkable vintage of port wine ever 
known. The wine made in that year was not indeed 
so fine as that of 1815, but it was nearly as good, and 
it was such in other respects as had never been known 
before; for the wine made in 1820 was as sweet as 
syrup, and nearly as black as ink, it was full of 
naturally-formed alcohol, and of all the various con- 
stituents — most of them far beyond the analysis of 
the ablest chemist — which go to make of wine a 
liquor differing from all other liquors. It was this 
seemingly most favourable circumstance which, in 
time, injured the good repute of port wine ; for the 

Q 



226 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

public, having once tasted this dark, liqueur-like, 
highly flavoured wine of 1820, would accept of 
nothing less dark and less rich as genuine port. Then 
set in the adulteration of port wine, and all the 
various manoeuvres by which wines lacking colour, 
flavour, and bouquet are endowed artificially with 
characteristics which nature has not bestowed upon 
them. 

These tricks began before the grapes had left the 
winepress, into which were thrown bags containing 
dried elderberries, whose colouring matter was 
transferred to the grape-juice. When the must had 
gone some way towards fermentation — before, that 
is, the whole of its sweetness was converted into 
spirit — brandy in far greater proportion than had 
previously been employed was added to check the 
fermentation. Here, then, was a wine to which arti- 
ficial means had imparted colour, sweetness, and 
spirit; but nothing could give it the full, natural 
vinous flavour, for this was hindered by the over- 
interrupted fermentation. Such tampering as this 
would ruin any wine but port, and the result would 
be a poor, undrinkable stuff; and with port it only 
did not entirely fail because the Lusitanian grape, 
ripened in the intense heat of its native hill-slopes, 
develops such powerful vinous qualities as even this 
hard treatment of it could not entirely suppress. 

Things went on without much change for the first 
half of the present century. Sherry, as I have 
shown, took the place of madeira. Port, however, 
though much abused, still held its ground ; but the 



PORT WINE. 227 

easy public was beginning to feel aggrieved ; the 
processes of port wine making began to leak out, 
and the evils sometimes connected with those pro- 
cesses began to be greatly exaggerated : bad jokes 
about blacking and logwood began to circulate. 
' Your old port, mind,' said Douglas Jerrold, ordering 
a fresh bottle at an inn, ' not your elder port ; ' and 
the insinuation, as we have seen, was not unjustified. 
In 1852 the grievances of wine drinkers had not 
lessened, while their knowledge of wine had greatly 
increased. Things were ripe for a change. In 
this year occurred two events which mainly brought 
it about. One was the session of a Committee of 
the House of Commons during the summer of 1852. 
The other was the vine disease — the. oidium 1 — 



1 The Oidium Tucheri appears in early summer as a white, 
filmy mould or fungus on the leaves ; later on, it shows on the 
unripe fruit ; and if allowed to run its course, it stunts the growth 
of the grape, and in most cases causes it to dwindle, to split open, 
and to rot. The panic produced in districts where the vine repre- 
sents eighty or ninety per cent, of the farmer's produce, may easily 
be imagined. The finest growths of wine suffered first, just as the 
most highly-bred animals succumb soonest to an epidemic. A 
large vineyard in Burgundy produced that year twenty- three 
hogsheads (pieces), which the year before had yielded over two 
hundred. The Medoc wine farmers suffered greatly, but some- 
what less than those of other parts of France. In the port wine 
district the year 1852 was disastrous. The farmers who grow the 
vines that make port grow hardly any other crop. One of the 
best vineyards, which had seldom given less than one hundred 
and sixty pipes, made in the year 1852 but five; and the quality 
was so poor that the labourers on the estate could hardly drink it. 
In Madeira the destruction of vines was greater than elsewhere ; 
and for several years no wine at all was produced — none at least 
that could rank as madeira. If science or empiricism had not 

Q 2 



^28 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

which, though observed seven years before, first 
appeared in great virulence in the same summer ; 
and, for the time, almost ruined the vineyards of 
Europe. 

The French were the first in the field with a 
remedy, which is found in sulphur. Blown on to 
the vine leaves and grape bunches, in the shape of 
an impalpable powder, from a pair of bellows, the 
cure is perfect. The fungus growth is arrested, and 
if the plant be well dredged over with sulphur 
periodically from early spring-time, it is seldom even 
attacked. The French vine growers, to whose 
quicker wits the value of the cure came home 
sooner than to those of the farmers of Spain, 
Portugal, Madeira, and Germany, got their vineyards 
into full production while the farmers of Southern 
Europe were still employing their priests with bell 
and book to exorcise the evil spirit that had invaded 
their vineyards. Thus did the Frenchmen push 
forward in the race ; and would have come near to 
winning it, so far as Great Britain was concerned, 
had their competition not been hindered by the 
heavy import duties which, though now greatly 
reduced, still most unfairly handicapped them. 

The other event, the evidence taken in Committee, 
caused a great deal of commotion in the world of 
wine consumers. What happened in most Parlia- 
mentary Committees happened in this one. A' 

devised an almost perfect remedy, there is good reason to believe 
that at the present clay not a vineyard, vine, or wine-merchant 
would exist in Europe. 



PORT WINE. 229 

huge mass of evidence — some valuable, more worth- 
less, and most of it ex parte and interested, and 
therefore worse than worthless — was laid before a 
party of not very competent judges, who possessed 
neither capacity, nor the necessary knowledge, nor 
even leisure, to sift it. 

Among the witnesses the one whose evidence 
created by far the most interest was the late Baron 
Forrester. He was the only witness who could 
speak from personal experience of port wine making, 
being a merchant residing at Oporto, and he did not 
hesitate to speak out boldly what was in him to say. 
Certainly, liberavit animam, he made a clean breast 
of it. This gentleman, an energetic man, very asser- 
tive of opinions unpalatable to his fellow port wine 
merchants, but which were by no means wholly desti- 
tute of soundness, had arrived at the conclusion that 
port could be made without any adventitious spirit, or 
with but very little, and without the help of colouring 
matter. 

These modest propositions were not enunciated 
without arousing a violent controversy, in which 
Mr. Forrester argued his point with much strong 
denunciation of his trade rivals. His evidence, 
however, produced, and deservedly produced, a great 
effect in this country. 

I do not agree with a great deal that was 
advanced by Baron Forrester, but it is incontestable 
that this remarkable man left his mark on the history 
of the English wine trade, and that the effects of his 
writings have been on the whole salutary. 



230 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

Mr. Forrester paid his theories the compliment of 
acting up to them. He proposed to himself to make 
wine as he had said it should be made, and he 
delivered lectures in various towns in England, 
explaining his views and his intentions — and these 
were to sell pure port wine. It was triumphantly 
asserted by his opponents that much of his port wine 
did not keep sound, and was returned to him by his 
customers. Even if this allegation had been true, 
which it probably was only to a limited extent, it 
proves nothing beyond Mr. Forrester's want of skill 
or luck, or his too vehement belief in a sound theory ; 
for that port will keep which is made without brandy 
added to check fermentation, is a quite demonstrable 
proposition. Whether the wine does not require a 
little brandy afterwards is another matter ; and it 
does not appear that Mr. Forrester denied this, or 
that he failed in most cases to make this subsequent 
addition of spirit. 

The true point at issue has always seemed to me 
to be, not whether port can be made without the 
addition of distilled wine, but whether wine so made 
is worth making or worth drinking. Such wine 
is an unmarketable product, and I think deserv- 
edly so. It is a strong, rough and comparatively 
flavourless liquor. If a man were to add six drops 
of ink to a glass of very common red burgundy he 
would get something exceedingly like unfortified 
port. Every Oporto wine merchant has tried the ex- 
periment of unfortified port wine. It is a pity they 
cannot sell it, for they would quickly make their 



PORT WINE. 231 

fortunes ; but the plain truth is that it is an abomina- 
ble drink. 

Public opinion was in this state when Mr. 
Gladstone turned his attention to the question of 
wine. It was clear enough that a reform was needed, 
and if the then Chancellor of the Exchequer had 
been an ordinary man, the reform would have been 
brought about in a very simple and straightforward 
manner, and — with due deference be it suggested — 
with a result possibly more satisfactory to the ex- 
chequer, to wine consumers, and to the majority of 
wine merchants, than that which has followed upon 
the revolution in the wine trade effected in 1860 and 
1861. But Mr. Gladstone is not an ordinary man, 
nor could a great Budget speech be made out of so 
very simple a matter as a reduction of the wine 
duties by a reasonable amount, and the fixing of a 
maximum of spirituous strength beyond which wine 
should cease to be classed as wine, and be taxed as 
spirit. 

There had already been enunciated theories about 
pure wines, unbrandied wines, and so forth, and these 
somewhat vague notions were fixed, crystallized, and 
made popular by Mr. Gladstone. 

Nothing could be more elaborate, nothing more 
ingenious, and yet nothing more lucid and, to quite 
ignorant people, more convincing, than Mr. Glad- 
stone's exposition of the grand principle that was 
brought home to the comprehension and convictions 
of the whole British nation the morning after the 
Chancellor's Budget speech. The argument was 



232 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW, 

shortly this : wine is fermented grape juice, and this 
juice generates in the course of fermentation a certain 
percentage of spirit, say from eighteen to twenty-six 
per cent., 1 more or less. Any addition of spirit over 
and above this naturally developed quantity is an 
unnecessary, an altogether abominable and reprehen- 
sible addition, and a thing to be discouraged and even 
punished. Moreover, it is a defrauding of the spirit re- 
venue that a liquor should pay the lower duty on wine, 
and be all the time partly composed of that which 
is liable to the higher duty upon spirit. This was the 
argument, and the inference, and the corollary. The 
reasoning is just, but the premises are quite false. 

Wine, to be sure, does not very often naturally 
generate more than thirty per cent, of spirit, though 
the Australians claim to make natural wine containing 
forty per cent., and the Spaniards have sometimes 
claimed as much or more, but the addition of some 
extraneous antiseptic substance, in greater or less 
quantity, is an incident in the preparation of every 
red wine of which it is intended to preserve the 
original soundness, that ever was made, or that ever 
will be made. The natural wines of Europe — 
those made to be consumed on the spot, and which are 

1 Of proof spirit, which is about one-half pure alcohol and one- 
half water. It has always been sturdily contended by the ' pure 
wine ' doctrinaires that wine cannot naturally generate more than 
twenty-five per cent, of spirit. It is an error pure and simple, but 
it is an error enshrined in one of those models of truth and dis- 
interestedness, an English Blue-book, and is, in consequence, 
brandished on all occasions by the 'pure wine' people as an un- 
bailable fact. 



PORT WINE. 233 

probably in the proportion of something like a thou- 
sand to one of the wines prepared for exportation — ■ 
are intended to be drunk in the summer after they 
are made. Very rarely will they keep two years. 
Great care in vinification will indeed go some way, 
but it cannot perform a miracle. Science has suggested 
many variations in wine making but it can do little 
but complicate what is a very simple matter. In order 
to show how simple and easy is the process of wine 
making, I proceed to describe it very shortly. 

The ripe grapes are thrown into a vat, and 
trodden under foot ; the skins, the stones, the juice, 
and some or all of the stalks are allowed to remain 
till the liquid ferments. When the heat of fermenta- 
tion begins to abate, the wine, for it has already the 
chief attributes of wine, is run into casks, or tonels, 
which are casks of a large size, whereby the active 
fermentation is checked, but it is usually not quite 
arrested till the cold weather of early winter sets in. 
The wine then clears, the casks are filled up to the 
top, the bungs are driven in tight, and the wine is fit 
for consumption. This is how the peasants and 
farmers of France, Italy and Greece, of Spain, of 
Portugal, and of Hungary, make the wines that 
quench their thirst in the heat and burden of the 
southern summer's day ; and this probably is how red 
wine has been made since first the juice of grapes 
was pressed out and fermented. The ingenuity of 
the most ingenious people in the world has added 
almost nothing to these time-honoured processes. 

In some of the vineyards of Burgundy, indeed, a 



234 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

machine is used to separate the stalks and the 
grapes, and the pressing of the grapes is done by 
machinery, but the great growths of the Medoc, the 
Chateau Margaux, and Chateau Lafitte are the result 
of processes nearly as simple as those employed by 
the peasant wine growers of Southern Europe, whose 
rough red wines are used as our labourers use beer 
or cider. The differences are differences in degree 
only ; in the care with which the grapes are picked, 
and green and decayed ones rejected, and with which 
a due proportion of the stalks is removed ; the 
attention with which the fermenting liquid is watched 
and drawn off at the right moment, the number of 
subsequent rackings, the scrupulous cleanliness of all 
the vessels used ; but the process which I have 
described — and my descriptions are not taken from 
books but from personal observation in several of the 
wine-producing countries of Europe — are those which 
suffiee only to make wine that is not wanted to keep 
more than a twelvemonth. There is in all red wine, — 
and none other quite deserves the name of wine, or 
contains its full constituents, 1 — there is in every red 

1 White wine is usually wine that is fermented without the 
skins and' stalks ; it does not, therefore, contain its full share of 
the various ' extractives ' which are factors in the result which we 
call wine. Common experience tells us that these wines have not 
the flavour or the bouquet of red wines, and analogy would lead 
us as surely as experience does to conclude that they do not share 
their remedial and restorative virtues. White wines are rather 
grape ciders than true wines. It is a well-known fact that when 
the viues of Madeira were destroyed in 1852, a liquor was made 
from apples and pears, and even from the fruit of the loquat tree, 
and that such fermented liquor was near enough in character to 



PORT WINE. 235 

wine, with one or two exceptions which I will notice 
presently, some element of decay which, in a longer 
or a shorter time, brings about its destruction. 

In ancient times, as soon as a wine had obtained 
any repute beyond the district of its production, some 
artificial mode of preserving it was devised. With 
every respect for the skill of wine makers and wine 
merchants of modern days, they must be pronounced 
to be mere children in comparison with the wine arti- 
ficers of ancient Greece. The people of Cette and 
Hamburg profess to imitate any wine they are asked 
for, but then who that has tasted ' Hambro' Sherry,' 
or ' Cette Port,' can speak of the performances of 
these French and German rogues with common 
patience ? Sticky, pungent, sickly, and altogether 
abominable compounds of potato spirit, treacle, and 
unknown chemical flavourings — often, it is asserted, 
without a drop of grape juice — these are what a Ger- 
man writer positively boasts of as triumphs of applied 
science. Very different were the practices of the 
Greeks. Their imitations of the best growths of 
Italy were, we are informed, preferred at Kome to 
the genuine wines themselves. 

The wine doctors of the present day, in possessing 
alcohol, have one signal advantage over those of ancient 
Greece and Eome, who knew not the art of distilling 
spirit. Alcohol is the sheet anchor of the modern 

the true wine of the island to sell in England as inferior madeira ; 
and champagne made of gooseberries and rhubarb, abominable as 
it is, is not so unlike the French wine as to fail in finding a ready 
sale. 



236 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

wine maker. What, then — might a wine maker in 
Cadiz, Bordeaux, Macon, or Oporto ask — were the 
methods they employed by which, in the absence of 
brandy, wine could be preserved for ten, twenty, and 
even sixty years and upwards ? We have fortunately 
several of the treatises upon wine making by ancient 
authors, and we are able to follow step by step the 
ingenious processes formed on discoveries which the 
Eomans and the Greeks, our masters in the art of 
wine making, had arrived at ; not by means of 
scientific deductions, but by the pure empirical 
method of frequent failure and occasional success. 

These forgotten processes have an important bear- 
ing upon the question of the preservation of wines 
and their so-called adulteration. It is the question 
which underlies the whole subject of wine for us in 
this country, who can as a rule drink none but such 
as is so prepared artificially as to enable it to travel 
by sea and by land, and to keep sound a longer or 
shorter time. It is, moreover, a question upon which, 
for obvious reasons, those who are most capable of 
enlightening the public are the most interested and 
least impartial of teachers. Its importance then 
being such, the present writer, who claims to have 
enjoyed peculiar opportunities of watching the appli- 
cation of some of the processes of the ancients in the 
very countries where their wines were grown, makes 
no apology for dwelling for a moment on this subject 
of ancient wine making. 

In ancient times the preliminary treading out of 
the grapes and the expressing of their juice were pre- 



PORT WINE. 237 

cisely such as I have already described, and the colour 
of the wine and its astringency were, as they still are, 
greater or less according as the must was allowed to 
remain a longer or shorter time with the stalks and 
skins. The must was in all cases eventually drawn into 
dolia— large, wide-mouthed jars of porous earthen- 
ware, coated inside with pitch — and in these vessels the 
liquid was allowed to ferment, and, on or about the 
ninth day, had become wine. A lid was then fitted 
closely to the top of the great jar, or dolium, and, it 
is presumed, luted, to keep out the air. The lid was 
removed once a month, the wine skimmed, and the 
loss by evaporation made up from another jar. The 
wine was now ready for consumption under the name 
of ' vinum dollar e J which we may translate freely 
' vin ordinaire in the wood.' 

Eed wine so made in the latitude of Borne or 
Naples would exactly resemble the commoner country 
wines with which every traveller in the South of 
Europe is familiar, with this difference, that it would 
have a flavour of pitch from the lining of the jar in 
which it had been kept, and this taste every single 
wine made in ancient times must have more or less 
possessed. This is perhaps enough of itself to condemn 
such ancient wines in the opinion of modern wine 
drinkers, but if the reader will take the word of one 
who has drunk wine so flavoured, the taste is by no 
means disagreeable. The pitch used in the South of 
Europe is not the coarse gum distilled from the pines 
that grow in Northern Europe, but the much milder 
and more aromatic pitch yielded by the pine of Italy, 



238 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

the Stone Pine ; and men soon acquire a taste for 
such flavours. 

Before I begin to describe the methods whereby 
the ancients, who possessed neither spirit nor sugar 
(the two substances without which modern wine 
merchants and wine doctors could not move a single 
step), practised the art of wine curing, with a success 
now lost, I will state in a very few words what is the 
nature of the problem offered to them and to us by 
the preservation of wines. 

The juice of grapes contains among many com- 
ponents, mostly in infinitesimal proportions, such as 
gelatine, gum, wax, potash, soda, lime, iron, and 
many others which need not at present be regarded, 
considerable percentages of acid, of sugar, of albumen, 
and of tannin. It is with these four constituents only 
that we need for the moment occupy ourselves. It 
is the presence of the albumen chiefly that makes 
grape juice a fermentable liquid when it is exposed to 
a temperature of between sixty and eighty degrees 
of Fahrenheit. Sugar has, as is well known, no power 
of fermenting and of passing into decay — of which 
fermentation is one of the first stages — is by itself 
incapable of change, but the albuminous part of the 
must, the so-called ferment, causes the sugar to be 
decomposed, to break up and separate into spirit and 
into carbonic acid — in plain English, causes the must 
to ferment, and when most of the sugar is thus trans- 
formed into spirit, the wine making is complete ; but 
the process does not end here, seeing that vinous 
fermentation is but one step towards complete decay. 



PORT WINE. 239 

If left to itself the liquid would next undergo the 
acetous fermentation, and thereafter the putrid. A 
natural wine, accordingly, with due deference to 
certain ' doctrinaires,' is a wine that, whatever may 
be its present soundness, is on the high road to decay. 
Wine making is therefore the art of stopping, for a 
longer or shorter time, and by artificial means, the 
progress of putrescence after the liquor has passed 
the first stage towards it. I have shown how with 
common wines this is done by drawing the wine from 
its lees, removing it, that is, from a part of the ferment- 
producing albumen, fibrin, and so forth, which, so 
soon as spirit begins to form, fall to the bottom. To 
do this, and to transfer the wine to a cool cellar, does 
not indeed quite stop fermentation, but it nearly 
arrests it. The process goes on slowly for a month 
or two, more and more of the sugar passing into car- 
bonic acid gas and into spirit, and more and more 
albumen falling down as sediment, then the frosts of 
winter come and stop even this slower fermentation, 
and then, as I have shown, the wine clears. 

The problem in wine making then is simply this — 
how, without imparting any ill savour or unwhole- 
some quality to the wine, to get rid of this aptitude 
to decay. The difficulty of course increases with the 
richness of the wine ; with wine, that is, which 
possesses the largest share of those constituents which 
go to make what is called ' body ; ' in other words, 
with the wines that contain the least water, and that 
are, therefore, cceteris paribus, the most valuable ; — 
with the burgundies, the ports, and the various rich 



240 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

but commercially useless, because imperfectly made, 
red wines of Spain and Italy. It is precisely with 
rich wines of this character that the Greeks and 
Eomans tried and solved the problem before us. 

Sugar, spirit, and the tannin contained in the 
wine itself, are the three chief preservative agents in 
wine making, with the addition of one very important 
extraneous one — sulphur. We shall see how the 
ancients applied every one of these agents, always 
remembering that, having no sugar nor distilled 
spirit, they could not make direct use of those sub- 
stances, and how they anticipated in their practice 
some of the so-called discoveries of modern days. 

The wine which we have followed in its course as 
far as the ' dolium ' was by the ancients racked again 
and again so soon as the fermentation had completely 
ended ; being received each time into a vessel charged 
with the fumes of burning sulphur, 1 each time acquir- 
ing a fresh impregnation from the various resinous 
and antiseptic substances with which the jar was 
lined, and each time losing more and more of its albu- 
men, and therefore each time getting nearer and 
nearer to being an indestructible fluid. In the mean- 
while, some of the first and sweetest runnings from 
the wine-press had been kept apart, and the fermenta- 
tion of this liquor arrested while it was still full of 



1 The antiseptic properties of sulphurous acid gas are better 
known than understood. Sulphuring wines is a universal practice 
at the present day with the wine makers of all countries. The 
sulphur probably destroys the spores and germ growths which 
exist in most vinous liquids. 



PORT WINE. 241 

sugar. 1 To possess this sugar-charged liquid, whose 
sweetness was increasable by boiling, and whose 
albuminous portions were precipitated by the same 
means, was equivalent to and even better than the 
possession of sugar itself, whose use is so indispensable 
in the ' improvement ' of such wines as burgundies 
and brown sherries. When the wine had made all 
the spirit it could, and parted with most of its sugar, 
its austerity would have been great ; so great, indeed, 
that old wine of this sort made without sugar was 
drunk mixed with honey, in the proportion of four of 
wine and one of honey. It was therefore to restore 
the saccharine matter that the sweet must was added 
to the fermented wine, just as at the present day, 
in the great wine factory of Bercy, where the wines 
drunk in Paris undergo their final preparation for the 
metropolis, thousands of tons of sugar are mixed 
annually with the too austere wines of southern and 
central France. Here the advantage would clearly 
be with the ancients. To add un fermented grape 
juice, containing in itself all the elements of wine, is 
obviously better for the consumer than the simple 
addition of sugar. 

The ancients, however, knew a great deal more 
than this of wine curing. A French savant, Monsieur 
Appert, has professedly discovered the preservative 
and ripening effects upon wine of a heat nearly equal 

1 The possibility of this feat without the employment of alcohol 
is a measure of the skill of these old wine makers, and of the 
strength of their antiseptic compounds, that will come home 
\ery readily to the comprehension of modern wine merchants. 

R 



242 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

to that of boiling water, and M. Pasteur has more re- 
cently fully explained the rationale of the process in 
a learned volume. By exposing wine in closed ves- 
sels for a few hours to a temperature of 185 degrees 
of Fahr., these effects are, according to the French 
savant, produced. They were produced two thousand 
years ago, but in a much more complete way, by the 
application of artificial heat for weeks and months to 
the jars of wine ; and this practice was so universal 
that an ancient writer tells us that a heating-house, 
an apotheca or fumarium, was an indispensable part 
of every country house. The constancy of this prac- 
tice was, I make no doubt, one main cause of the 
soundness and durability of the ancient wines. The 
red wines, such as the Falernian, 1 were, we are told, 
hardly fit to drink under twenty years, and even the 
commoner wines required from four to ten. The 
Appert-Pasteur process, though much talked of at 
the time, has found but little favour with wine mer- 
chants, and is a proof how lamentably modern science, 
for once at least, falls short of ancient empiricism. 

1 The learned have concluded, very much to their satisfaction, 
that this most famous of the wines of antiquity was a white wine, 
like madeira. It was certainly, however, a red wine, and the 
' amber ' colour ascribed to it (Pliny says that amber of a good 
colour was called ' Falernian ') would apply only to its tawny 
appearance after long keeping. The frequent rackings and finings 
to which it was subjected would in a few years deprive it of colour. 
Ked wine almost always loses its colour with keeping. Old bur- 
gundy is invariably tawny, and port wine thirty or forty years old 
is of the very amber colour that distinguished the Falernian. A 
wine that possessed in some cases the austerity, and in others the 
sweetness ascribed to Falernian, could only have been a red 
wine, made with the full and perfect constituents of the grape. 



PORT WINE. 243 

The mellowness which all wine acquires by age is 
supposed, and I believe rightly supposed, to be partly 
due to its slow, or rather, its gradual oxygenation, 
and the heating of it would certainly promote this 
oxygenation, besides destroying the germs of a fungus 
growth which has been proved to be the forerunner, 
and perhaps the cause, of the decay of the wine. All, 
then, that modern science professes to accomplish by 
the immersion of the wine, in bottles or other hermeti- 
cally-closed vessels, in hot water for two Kours, was 
accomplished in the fumarium ; and a good deal more 
was done, for the fumarium, as its name implies, was 
a smoke-house, and there is not the smallest doubt that 
the pyroligneous acid of wood-smoke penetrated the 
comparatively porous texture of the earthenware jar, 
and communicated its flavour and its preservative 
virtues to the wine inside. The smoky flavour, unless 
in excess, was no more objected to than the similar 
flavour in Westphalia hams or the peat reek in whisky 
at the present day, 

I have reason to believe that a further effect was 

produced by long exposure in the fumarium. The 

well-known property of the vapour of water to pass 

through interstices of certain substances impermeable 

to the vapour of alcohol \ was, I consider, taken advan- 

1 A property not so well known, perhaps, as it should be. 
The Australian wine-growers tested the wines they sent to the 
Vienna Exhibition, and were astonished to find them stronger in 
spirit when the voyage was ended. The evaporation of the watery 
vapour in the tropics had reduced the quantity of the wine, and 
increased its strength by several degrees. This phenomenon 
takes place, as every experienced wine merchant knows, more con- 
spicuously with white than with red wine. 



244 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

tage of, and if so, the wine, after long exposure in the 
smoke-houses, would have become less bulky but more 
spirituous. In other words, the branclying of wine 
would have been virtually effected by a people who 
had never learnt how to distil spirit. 

Occasionally the reduction of bulk was carried 
much further. The wine was inspissated by heat — 
deprived, that is, of most of its water, and rendered 
therefore, bulk for bulk, much more valuable. Such 
inspissated wines were diluted with water when they 
were drunk, and the advantage of having wine in so 
portable a form is of course conspicuous enough in 
times when overland transit could only be effected by 
beasts of burden, and when traffic by sea was slow, 
difficult, dangerous, and costly. 

Having thus seen how the Greeks and Eomans 
' cured ' their wines, I am now going to tell how this 
object is attained with the principal varieties of wine 
drunk in Great Britain at the present day. 

I have said, and I most emphatically repeat, that 
all natural red wine is subject to decay, and that all 
wine whatsoever must be treated artificially before it will 
last more than one or two years. 

To begin with Claret. The finest growths of the 
Medoc district are peculiar in this respect, that they 
contain less fermentable matter than probably any 
known wine ; and this they owe partly to admirable 
care in vinification, partly to a very complete fermen- 
tation, but principally to the fact that the grapes 
that make the wine are not so charged with the ele- 
ments of vinosity as those ripened in warmer climates. 



PORT WINE. 245 

They require in consequence less artificial treatment 
than any other, and in the cases of the so-called 
6 first growths ' of Chateaux Margaux, Larose, and 
Lafitte, when the season has been a good one, the 
6 curing ' seldom goes further than repeated fumiga- 
tion with sulphur ; and the adulteration of the wine, 
if the word must be employed, amounts only to its 
very slight impregnation with the sulphurous acid 
gas, which is immediately converted into sulphuric acid, 
or vitriol. This, however, need cause no alarm ; the 
percentage is infinitesimal, and vitriol, though it has 
an ugly name, is, as every doctor will tell us, one of 
the best of tonics. 1 The quantity of spirit added to 
the fine claret is so small as hardly to be worth con- 
sidering at all. A few pints are thrown upon the 
grapes before the crushing begins, and a few more 
are added, ostensibly to rinse out the casks, whenever 
the wine is racked, and before it is shipped. In some 
cases perhaps clarets get no addition of spirit at all. 
The ' loading ' of claret is adopted chiefly for those 
wines intended for the English market, and is effected. 
by the addition of fuller bodied, more astringent, 
and more spirituous wines, such as those of Her- 
mitage. 

The above remarks apply to the half-dozen finer 
growths of the Medoc, wines which owe their poten- 
tiality of preservation to a happy coincidence of soil, 

1 This existence of vitriol in wines is, as might be supposed, a 
common ground of attack, but a very unfair one, seeing that the 
vitriol, or sulphuric acid, or the much greater proportion of it, 
would find substances that would immediately reduce it to the 
nearly inert condition of sulphates. 



246 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

climate, quality of wine, and care in cultivation and 
in vinification. The majority of these exquisite wines 
require to be kept four years in the wood to gain 
mellowness, and four in bottle to acquire ' bouquet.' 
After this, except in rare cases, claret (if unbrandied) 
slowly degenerates, loses colour, and acquires acidity 
and a bitter taste, then gets thick, and is sooner or 
later a ruined wine. Longevity in clarets not of the 
first growths is rare, and though instances of it may be 
quoted, they are chiefly found in wines that have 
never travelled twenty miles from their native cellar. 

The fact, then, that clarets can in rare instances be 
made without antiseptic treatment with spirit, is 
therefore an apparent but not a real exception to the 
rule I have laid down as to the necessity of such 
treatment in all red wines. The life of fine claret is 
indeed often greatly prolonged, but it is not preserved 
indefinitely. 

So much for the fine clarets. In them the tannin, 
or astringent quality, the great natural preservative 
against decay, and the natural acid of the grape, are 
both subordinated to its other constituents to make 
them in their way perfect wines. Not so the inferior 
growths of the Mecloc, which we alone of the con- 
sumers of them have christened j claret.' It is from 
these latter wines, whose acidity and astringency are 
as a rule in most disagreeable preponderance, that 
are fabricated the wines known in the wine trade as 
Chateau Margaux, Lafitte, and Larose. 

When we remember that these three vineyards 
together hardly cover five hundred acres, and never 



PORT WINE. 247 

in the most abundant years make so much as two 
thousand hogsheads of wine, scarcely enough to 
furnish the cellars of a score of wholesale wine 
merchants, it is somewhat ludicrous to reflect that 
any number of dozens of these expensive wines can 
be ordered from any number of wine merchants in 
any large city in Europe or America. From St. 
Petersburg to Lisbon, from Glasgow to Constantinople, 
from Montreal to New Orleans, and thence southwards 
to Eio and Buenos Ayres, and round the world to 
the great cities of Australia and India, a man 
may walk into any wine merchant's and order a 
dozen of Chateau Margaux or Lafitte, and be reason- 
ably disappointed if he is refused. 

The performance of this ; inexhaustible bottle 
trick ' over so wide a geographical area is only possi- 
ble by treating the inferior growths (not of the Medoc 
only, for the exports from Bordeaux of so-called 
Medoc wines are said by French writers to be twelve 
times greater than the whole production of that 
district) in such a way as to give them a fictitious 
resemblance to the first growths. To remove the 
excess of acid an alkali is employed, and of course a 
neutral salt is produced by their combination. Thin- 
ness and absence of flavour are remedied sometimes 
by the addition of more generous wines, occasionally 
by fruity syrups ; bouquet is sold in bottles in the 
chemists' shops of Bordeaux at ' two francs and up- 
wards > according to quality.' To get rid of excessive 
tannin is more difficult, but it can be effected by 
repeated fining, at some cost, however, to the flavour 



248 PORTUGAL: OLD AISD NEW. 

of the wine. This process is troublesome and expen- 
sive, and the majority of cheap clarets, if they are 
not rough, have a flat taste which reveals the secret 
of their treatment to all wine makers ; the majority of 
cheap clarets sold in this country, unless they be 
very poor and very watery indeed, are, when they 
contain all their native tannin, so rough that no one 
with any pretension to delicacy of palate cares to 
drink a glass undiluted with water. In France the 
commoner Bordeaux wines are used with water, and 
those that are drunk unmixed are prepared at Bercy 
for immediate consumption in the restaurants of Paris, 
by being watered and sweetened, flavoured and 
alcoholized. In this way the excess of tannin is not 
removed, but it is lessened by dilution or masked by 
sugar. 

All this, to be sure, is adulteration, but it is 

almost certainly harmless. It is easy to frighten 

simple and ignorant wine drinkers by telling them 

they are drinking vitriol, and sulphate of potash, and 

grain spirit, but it is a question of degree. Light 

French wine by common consent and judged by 

common experience is a wholesome article of diet, 

let who will speak against it. Its fault is that it is 

expensive. A wine, according to a writer who is 

considered an authority upon the subject, may be 

called cheap that costs not more than half-a-crown a 

bottle. Now, if such a wine be of French growth, let 

it be considered how very little vinous quality there 

is in a half-crown bottle of claret — in other words, 

how much water there is in proportion to the wine ; 



PORT WINE. 249 

not necessarily water of adulteration, but water that 
has been the original constituent of grapes ripened in 
a climate not hot enough to bestow upon them the 
full richness and vinosity that are found in the wines 
of the south, in port or burgundy, or even in sherry 
or madeira. Claret at fourteen shillings the dozen 
was to become the drink of the people, the drink of 
working men, and the reign of sobriety was forthwith 
to commence ; but the working man is no fool : 
before he spends fourteen shillings upon twelve 
bottles, that is, two gallons of ' Gladstone Claret,' he 
asks himself how many quarts of plain water he will 
have to deduct, and he refrains from the bargain. 
Light claret is not economical as a wine. It has 
never reached lower down in the social scale than the 
middle classes. 

Of sherry adulteration the same can be said as of 
claret. The finest wines of Xeres are soft, dry, and 
somewhat spirituous wines, and but little artificial aid 
is required to enable them to preserve their sound- 
ness to an age far exceeding that reached by claret. 
Even with the majority of such wines as these, and 
certainly with all the commoner sherries, the system 
of so-called ' plastering ' is followed, which consists in 
throwing about thirty pounds of dry plaster of Paris 
upon the quantity of untrodden grapes required to 
make a butt of wine. The result is to precipitate the 
natural wine acids, and to substitute for them sul- 
phuric acid ; this mineral acid coming into contact 
with the potash in the must, converts it into sulphate 
of potash, whereas had things taken their course, 



250 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

bitartrate of potash (commonly called tartar) would 
have been present — a salt always to be found in 
young wines. This is the head and front of the 
offence known as ' plastering,' made so much of by 
those who desire to exhibit sherry in its worst colours. 
Tartar is well known to be a not over wholesome 
constituent of newly-made wine. Sulphate of potash 
is certainly no very deleterious substance, and to put 
it in the stead of tartar may, for any evidence the 
other way, be rather a benefit than not. 

A heavier indictment against the sherry makers 
is their apparently too abundant use of spirit. A 
white wine can possess little or no tannin, and there- 
fore requires a preservative ; but, on the other hand, 
if well made, such a wine should not be troubled with 
the fruitiness and fermentable matter of the more 
vinous red wines ; it should therefore not need such 
a dose of spirit as it too often gets. It is probable 
that the demands of consumers, rather than the 
necessities of wine makers, are the cause of the ex- 
cess of spirit in sherry. The same taste also causes 
the dyeing of the wine with burnt sugar, and the 
sweetening and fortifying it with dulce, or half fer- 
mented grape-juice. These are quite harmless adul- 
terations — if they deserve the name — as innocent, 
indeed, and as openly employed, as the putting of 
sugar and cream into our cups of tea. On the whole 
I am convinced that sound sherry is a wholesome 
wine, and one which we could very ill afford to do 
without. 

Of champagne I need say little. Everyone knows 



POET, WINE. 251 

that it is an imperfectly fermented grape juice made 
of grapes not thoroughly ripened, sweetened with 
sugar-candy dissolved in brandy. The want of tan- 
nin is supplied by oak shavings or tannic acid. Back- 
ing and sulphuring are the chief methods of 4 curing ' 
it. Experience, which is always immeasurably supe- 
rior to the most positive utterances of theoretical 
chemists, teaches us that, in spite of its being so arti- 
ficial a wine, champagne is not only wholesome, but 
a remedial agent of the very greatest value. 

Hock and burgundy can hardly be regarded ^as 
common wines in England. The common, rough 
burgundies, indeed, find their way into consumption, 
and an indiscriminating public classes them with 
clarets ; and not unwisely, seeing that the inferior 
French red wines are artificially brought to something 
of a common standard. The 4 great wines ' of the 
Burgundy district, the ' Clos Yougeot,' ' Eichebourg,' 
and ' Eomanee Conti,' the most exquisite of wines, 
true ' drink of the gods,' will probably never be known 
in their full perfection beyond the region of their 
production. They will hardly bear travel by land, 
and transit by sea almost always injures them. 
Unfortunately, in the case of the wine of modern 
times, which is immeasurably superior to all others, 
the skill of the modern wine curer utterly breaks 
down. 

Though port wine has the reputation of being the 
most adulterated and the least natural of all wines, it 
is, to the best of my knowledge and belief — and I 
have had opportunities of watching all the processes 



252 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

of making it during thirteen years — one of the very- 
purest. I believe that a man who drinks a glass of 
port drinks as nearly natural and as concentrated a 
form of fermented grape juice as it is humanly 
possible to set before him. 

There are no secrets and there is no reserve about 
the processes of port vinification. All the world may 
learn all about them, and the Wine Committee of the 
House of Commons of 1879, which has now ended 
its labours, has collected and sifted so much evidence 
on the subject, and examined and cross-examined so 
many impartial and partial witnesses, that no one has 
any longer an excuse for ignoring the facts. 

Adulteration is in wine, as in everything else, 

mostly an affair of competition and of public taste. 

Formerly Englishmen liked port wine to be almost 

black in colour and very fruity and strong, whereupon 

dried elderberries were employed to help to stain it. 

If one merchant did it, his rivals had to follow suit. 

It was deplorable enough, but a little too much was 

made of it, for the wine was by no means seriously 

injured or made unwholesome. The light wine 

people, oblivious of their own misdeeds, were terribly 

hurt by the thought that anybody could dye a wine 

with elderberries. They did their utmost to publish 

the fact and to proclaim their own innocence. Doing 

this they perhaps did not mean to benefit the port 

wine trade, but they were Balaams unawares : meaning 

to bring a curse, they brought a blessing on the trade, 

for though the public were not made to leave off 

liking port wine, they left oil' liking it over dark and 



POUT WINE. 25 



fruity ; and straightway the elderberry staining 
ceased. 

As for adulteration by logwood it always was a 
libellous fable. Any chemist knows that the peculiar 
reaction of logwood makes it absolutely inoperative 
as a dye in any sort of wine. As long as the public 
want port wine to have no more than its own true 
garnet-red colour, which turns with age to a dark 
amber, no merchant would be so extravagant as to 
put elderberry into it. If the wine is required to be 
made darker, there is a much cheaper dye and a far 
more beautiful one always at hand in Portugal : it is 
the natural colour of the darker varieties of the port 
wine grape. To say that grapes are cheaper in Por- 
tugal than elderberries in England seems an ex- 
aggeration, but to my certain knowledge they are 
much cheaper. About three years ago I was offered 
more for the produce of a few elderberry trees in 
Surrey than I could get for an equal weight of the 
produce of my vines at Oporto. I wish to make 
this point clear in support of my contention that 
port wine is pure, because there is nothing so cheap 
as port wine itself to adulterate it with. A curious 
fact is that the common rough clarety wines grown 
in the neighbourhood of Oporto and drunk by the 
peasantry are often dearer than the choice vintages 
of the port wine district. The apparent anomaly is 
to be accounted for by the fact, that while the com- 
moner wine is drinkable within six months of its 
leaving the wine vat, new port wine — the trade speak 
of it as young wine — has gone but one stage of its 



254 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

journey towards being drinkable port wine. It has 
to be kept, to be racked, to be fined, to be skilfully 
' turned over,' to be carefully watched, to be fortified 
with distilled wine, and previous to all this to be 
carried a perilous voyage down the Eiver Douro, to 
pay warehouse charges in Oporto and England, to 
pay a tax on export, a heavy import duty, merchants' 
profits, freight charges, insurance charges, and several 
others. Port wine had need then to start cheap, for 
else assuredly none but millionaires could ever drink it. 
My friend Mr. Gallenga, the eminent correspon- 
dent of the ' Times,' in the course of his recent im- 
partial investigations into the mysteries of the great 
wine question, informed me, in illustration of the 
cheapness of wines in the country of their production, 
that a pint of an honest red wine could be bought in 
Piedmont from the cask on a market day for 20 cen- 
times ; I was able still further to extend the limit of 
Mr. Gallenga's illustration by informing him that I, a 
farmer in Portugal, would be glad to sell sound red 
wine, excellent of its kind, from my own vineyard at 
considerably less than three pence per quart. To be 
sure my wine, made on a granite soil, though sound 
and strong, would not recommend itself to a culti- 
vated taste. It has the gout du terrain, which, if my 
recollection serves me, nearly all the wines of Northern 
Italy possess. Nevertheless wine is wine, and it can 
cost no more to make it on a good soil and with a 
good aspect than under the most unfavourable cir- 
cumstances. Mr. Gallenga naturally asked, 'Then 
where do all the profits go ? ' So far as port wine is 



PORT WINE. 255 

concerned I think I have already given an intelligible 
answer to this question. 

Port wine is made in only one corner of Portugal. 
It is a district marked out by nature itself to be one 
huge vineyard ; its soil is a peculiar brown, crumbling, 
slaty schist ; it is cut off from the sea by one lofty 
range of mountains, it is shut in from the north and 
east by others. This district of the port wine vine- 
yards is hilly and precipitous, and the vines grow on 
the barren-looking soil built up into multitudinous 
terraces often from top to bottom of the hills. This 
singular tract lies about sixty miles up the Douro and 
on its banks, and it occupies a strip of country about 
twenty-seven miles in length, and five or six in breadth. 
It is cold here in winter, but in summer the sun 
shines into the narrow valley, and is reverberated from 
the hill amphitheatres with a particular intensity. 
The whole region, cut off from the breezes, lies still 
and becalmed under the summer sun : the heat is 
tropical. Nowhere else in Europe can the vines get 
such a roasting, nowhere else are the juices of the 
grape elaborated into such a rich and potent liquor. 
One understands port wine at the first glance of the 
wine country. It would of course be easy to get a 
hotter summer in the tropics, but the vine is not a 
plant of the tropics, it wants the severe cold of winter 
to give it a seasonable rest. It gets this : the port 
wine district is one of the few parts of Portugal where 
I have seen ice that will bear a man. 

The population of the wine country is scanty, and 
is of course composed chiefly of wine farmers. 



256 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

Labourers are few, but when the vines require their 
annual hoeings and pruning, and at vintage time, 
men flock in from the neighbouring provinces and 
from as far off as the mountains of Galicia in 
northern Spain. 

In the port wine district the vines are grown as 
bushes — something as currant trees are with us. 
They are closely pruned down early in the year and 
the summer shoots are supported by stakes. Else- 
where in the Peninsula (except where a specially 
good wine is wanted) the vine is trained over 
trellises or against pollarded trees. It is pretty and 
there are more grapes got in this way, but the wine 
is poor. 

The vintage begins towards the end of September ; 
it is conducted more or less in the manner I have 
already described. Much care and knowledge are re- 
quired in the selection of the right proportions of the 
many varieties of grapes that grow in the district, some 
for colour, some for flavour, some for bouquet, some 
for strength ; and scientific instruments (saccharo- 
meters) are used to determine the right moment for 
drawing off the must. It is drawn into tonels, huge 
casks often with a capacity of over thirty pipes. 
The drawing off and the slight addition of alcohol 
now made arrests or nearly arrests the fermentation. 

When I say alcohol in connection with a high or 
fairly high class of port wine, I ought to say distilled 
wine. It is a spirit distilled from the wine itself and 
contains of course only that which is inherent in the 
wine it is derived from. This spirit thus added 



PORT WINE. 21 



•)/ 



during the growth, as it were, of the wine, becomes 
chemically incorporated and combined with it. This 
fact came out clearly in the evidence before the last 
Parliamentary committee. 

With the cold of autumn the wine deposits its 
lees ; it is then racked off into the ordinary port wine 
pipes — a long and narrow cask containing 115 gallons. 
In the spring it is carried down the Douro to the 
warehouses of the merchants at Oporto. 

It is the practice of the established English wine 
merchants at Oporto to buy the grape produce of 
the vineyards and to have the wine made by the 
farmers under their own superintendence, watched 
and warehoused by their own employes, and finally 
brought into their own keeping at Oporto. The 
wine firms hold enormous stocks of wine in their 
warehouses ripening for English consumption. This 
large stock is essential to the business, for the wines 
shipped are of two sorts : ' vintage ' wines, that is, 
wines of a particular year ; and ' brand ' wines, which 
are usually made up of the vintages of several years. 
When a shipper gets an order for, say, a hundred 
pipes (more or less) of wine of a particular character, 
he naturally requires a great variety of wines where- 
with to make up the order. It is to be observed 
that a brand wine is not by any means an inferior 
wine: it may often indeed be superior to a vintage 
wine, and depends of course upon the quality of the 
wines of which it is made up. Except in remarkable 
years, where nature combines in one vintage all the 
various excellences which port wine can possess, I 

s 



258 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

am inclined to think that port, like hermitage, is the 
better for being made up of the produce of different 
vineyards and even different years. The wine district, 
as I have shown, is one huge vineyard ; beyond its 
limits little good wine is made, within them little 
that is not good. There is therefore no need for 
classification of wines by the names of their vine- 
yards as in France. Some few port wine vineyards 
especially favoured in soil and aspect are known to 
fame. Yesuvio, Koeda, Eoriz, Noval, and a very few 
others have reputations beyond Portugal. 

It will be seen from my account of port wine 
growing, making, and selling that the trade is some- 
thing of a monopoly — a monopoly of a legitimate kind 
enough, resulting from the skill and knowledge 
applied to it and the capital invested. The supply 
too is limited by the limits of the region which 
furnishes it. What with the ravages of the oidium 
disease in the past and of the Phylloxera Vastatrix in 
the present and future, I do not think the port wine 
country will in future years ever send more than 
40,000 pipes of wine to England. 

When I speak of a monopoly, I do not mean that 
competition does not exist. It is active enough- 
witness the low price of port wine — but it is confined 
in the long run to the established firms. An outsider 
can only satisfactorily enter the trade by the slow 
process of establishing warehouses, getting together a 
skilled staff and purchasing a stock. To be sure 
there are occasional opportunities of buying wine in 
open market, and such wine may even bean honest 



PORT WINE. 259 

wine, but it may also be nothing of the kind. There 
is a class of persons in the wine district who have got 
themselves the name of Boticarios — apothecaries — 
and who have the reputation of compounding their 
wines with queer ingredients. Their wine may seem 
fair enough, but wines, like men, must have fair ante- 
cedents as well as a fair seeming. A wise man will 
no more take such doubtful liquors into his cellar 
than he will take a servant into his service without a 
character. The one is apt to turn sour, and the other 
to steal his spoons. I clo not think such wine as this 
often finds its way to England. I hope it does not. 
Fortunately for us there is a demand for wine not of 
the highest quality in Portugal itself, and for shipment 
to Brazil. 

There is a method of adulterating port wine which 
I fear is not uncommon, but it can only be practised 
in Great Britain. It consists in mixing it with the 
red wine made in the neighbourhood of Tarragona in 
Spain. This Spanish wine is as nearly as possible 
half the price of the very cheapest port wine. It is 
made as port wine is made, and is quite a harmless, 
sound and honest wine, very like port wine to look at, 
but having little or none of those qualities of high 
flavour and bouquet, none of those essential etherous 
attributes which make port wine a wine apart. A 
mixture with ' Spanish red,' as this estimable liquid 
is called, only spoils port wine in the sense that it 
dilutes it. It may be well supposed that ' Spanish 
red ' is sometimes a sore subject with port wine 
merchants. It may be argued, however, that the 

B 2 



260 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

demand for port in England is so much greater than 
the supply, that it is just as well for producers and 
consumers alike that it is adulterated with nothing 
worse than red Tarragona wine. The adulteration 
only applies to the cheapest kinds of wine — such as 
is sold in public houses ; but working men are getting 
to be connoisseurs, and many such establishments I 
am told enjoy a reputation for selling only the pure 
port wine of known firms. I do not suppose that 
any really respectable English wine merchant would 
mix his wine with anything. Nevertheless, whenever 
port wine seems to the customers to lack flavour and 
the price is not very low, a civil inquiry pointing to 
the possible presence of ' Spanish red ' might be 
judicious. 

Some years ago, c it came to my knowledge ' (as 
policemen say) in my official capacity in this city that 
a very curious error in geography was being perpe- 
trated. Some eighteen casks of red wine had come 
all the way to Oporto from the east coast of Spain 
for transhipment at this port to England. It seemed 
to me quite to come within the sphere of my official 
duties to mention the fact of this circuitous voyage 
in a telegram to the Customs authorities at home, and 
when the ship reached its destination a custom house 
officer was ready with a branding iron to mark the 
eighteen impostors indelibly with the words ' Eed 
wine from Spain.' No one consequently was a loser 
by this freak of navigation, and the spirited importer 
was no gainer. 

It would not very well become me to go fully in 



PORT WINE. 261 

this place into the question of the wine duties, which 
there is some talk of modifying, nor do I think my 
readers would be greatly entertained with me if I did. 
Yet it is a great question with much of human interest 
about it : a subject for a three hours' Budget-speech, 
a question for bold financial generalization, fall of 
interesting detail, bristling with facts and data ; with 
all sorts of conflicting interests to steer between, and 
the haven in sight of great commercial development 
and of great philanthropic results. It is a thing 
for only one great statesman and orator to meddle 
with. 

I will therefore say no more than this — that our 
wine duties oppress no one very much. They are 
not a pressing grievance. They bring, in a very 
comfortable way, not very far short of two millions 
sterling. We can get along with them very plea- 
santly, but if France, Spain, and Portugal like to 
make it worth our while, we will reduce the duties 
in their interests, in our own, and in those of free 
trade. Instead of making France pay a shilling a 
gallon on her wine we might let her off with six- 
pence, and Spain and Portugal might obtain admission 
for their sherries and ports with a shilling payment 
on each gallon instead of half-a-crown, which is the 
present duty. If we lower our duties in this way and 
make no treaty bargains with these three countries 
it is free trade and good sense, but it is freer trade 
and better sense if we lower the duties and make 
good bargains too ; always assuming that the achieve- 
ment of three commercial treaties abreast is a diplo- 



2C2 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

matic possibility, which is extremely doubtful. Only 
let the arrangements be for a long term, that there 
may be no turning back towards the road to pro- 
tection. 

I have been often questioned, as a person who 
ought to know, as to the dietetical properties of port 
wine. Certainly if the general public are in no 
better agreement on the point than the doctors there 
is plenty of occasion for such questioning. We 
have recently had an active controversy among the 
faculty chiefly on this very point, and it struck me 
when I read it that anyone with strong opinions on 
either side might find the fullest medical authority 
for his views. My own modest opinion about wine 
entirely coincides with that which the world at large 
has held for several thousand years past, and will 
probably hold for as long a time to come. It is that 
wine in moderation is the best and most harmless 
restorative in health and sickness that the ingenuity of 
man has ever invented. I think that the more a wine 
is a wine the more restorative it is. Whatever may 
be the theoretical views of some medical gentlemen, I 
find there is a consensus of practice among the doctors 
of all nations to give wine to the convalescent and to 
the weakly, and to give them the most vinous wine 
for choice. The consumption of port wine at the 
London hospitals is, to my knowledge, enormous. 

The pure wine theorists conceive that sound light 
claret is more digestible than sherry and port. I 
think there can be no doubt about it ; so also is claret 
and water more digestible than pure claret, and rice 



POET WINE. 263 

pudding lighter food than beef and bread ; but if a 
healthy man, in full work of brain or muscle, wants to 
maintain his health and his strength, or having been 
ill to get well again, he had better drink something 
more restorative than claret and water, and eat some- 
thing more substantial than rice pudding. 

Some few doctors in the controversy differed from 
their brother doctors to the extent of advising people 
to drink spirits and water rather than wine. This 
suggestion seems to me to be singularly opposed to 
common sense, and to be put forward on the assump- 
tion that it is the alcohol in the wine that is chiefly 
restorative and of value, which is altogether a mis- 
take. It is not the alcohol, but the ethers and the 
other various and purely vinous ingredients, the 
cunning product of nature's own laboratory, which 
chiefly are restorative. It is not exactly a chemical 
question, for the best chemists can tell us little on 
these obscure points. It is a question settled by any 
one who drinks a glass of fine old burgundy, or of 
port, or of sweet tokay. Solvitur bibendo. I consider 
this suggestion of the doctors to be a particularly 
mischievous one, because raw spirits, with or without 
water, spirits not incorporated and combined with 
wine, are to most people stimulating, and certainly 
neither soothing nor restorative. They certainly also 
are injurious sooner or later. If a man takes a glass 
of wine when he requires it he is satisfied : he has 
taken a calmative and a tonic. If he drinks the 
equivalent alcohol in the shape of spirits and water 
he is not satisfied or made the better, the dose is too 






264 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

small to calm his nerves, and large enough to do hiin 
a hurt. He wants more and he goes on. I think 
if we English drank wine and beer, eschewing spirits, 
we should cease to be a nation of drunkards. 1 I 
hardly see a drunken man about Oporto, where strong 
port wine is to be got for a trifle in every public house. 
The southern Spaniards are as sober as the Portuguese, 

1 But it must not be light wine. That the light wine of France 
was to wean us from spirits, close the gin palaces, and make Eng- 
land sober and virtuous, was the pleasant vision raised for us in 
1860, and too soon discovered to be a dream. It is found in prac- 
tice that the general ran of men who drink light wine qualify it 
by drinking spirits neat. The Assommoir is set up in the Paris 
wine shop, men want alcohol all the more for getting little of it 
in their wine, and take a dram with nearly every glass of claret. 
It almost sounds like an exaggeration to say as much as this, and 
though I know very well it is true, I should hardly venture to 
put it on paper but for the admissions of some of the French wit- 
nesses before the recent Parliamentary "Wine Committee. 

M. Lalande, President of the Chamber of Commerce of Bor- 
deaux, says (No. 5268) : ' In spite of the enormous increase in the 
duties on our spirits since the war, the consumption has increased, 
and also the consumption of wine has been increasing too. There 
seems to be not much relation between the two.' That is, one 
does not supplant the other. The evidence of M. Teissonniere, 
Vice-President of the Chamber of Commerce of Paris, is stronger 
still. He actually suggests the lowering of the duty on light 
wines in this country, on the ground that more consumption of 
them includes more consumption of spirits, and would secure a 
larger spirit revenue ! ' This drink,' he says (Answer No. 50)y 
meaning light wine, ' brought into general consumption would in- 
crease the consumption of your alcoholic liquors, and I will give 
you examples in proof of that from France.' . . . ' The city of 
Paris which consumes annually 4,000,000 hectolitres of wines 
consumes also 1,173,000 of alcohol.' 

This is on the whole the best argument I have yet met with 
for lowering the duties on those strong full wines which certain! 
do harmlessly supersede the use of alcoholic drink. 



PORT WINE. .. 265 

though strong wine is their drink too. I hope the 
small minority of doctors who recommend raw spirits 
to their patients will take all these points into their 
consideration and modify their opinions. 

So much for the doctors, who, though they do not 
agree among themselves, and might therefore be left 
to answer each other, are yet practical men. As for 
the wine specialists, they are nothing of the kind, and 
no more to be implicitly trusted than other specialists 
in science. If I did not fear to seem malicious I could 
tell some queer anecdotes of certain conflicts of practice 
and theory on the part of these gentlemen. Their 
theories are gospel truths to them and to people who 
run after new doctrine, only until they are reversed 
by newer theories ; and impartial observers see that 
this reversal happens in a cycle of about three years. 
Such theories as they favour us with would never get 
a footing among us at all if only we could afford time 
and patience and knowledge and preliminary scepti- 
cism for a close examination of them. In short, 

* C'est notre credulite qui fait leur science.' 

In conclusion I will repeat in very plain terms 
what is after all the most important axiom in connection 
with wine. It is that such a red wine as port, grown 
in the centre of the geographical zone which is the 
habitat of the vine plant, and under favouring in- 
fluences of soil and aspect, is so full of all the finest 
vinous attributes, and therefore, unfortunately, of all 
the elements of decay, that it requires a fuller anti- 
septic treatment than other and poorer wines. I 



^66 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

have shown how the ancients, skilful cenologists, 
indirectly alcoholized their wines though they knew 
not the art of distillation. Falernian was, I am 
absolutely sure, as fully alcoholized as the strongest 
port wine. Modern port wine makers alcoholize their 
wine directly, and no impartial man can deny that 
the result is an excellent result. If it be alleged that 
they put too much spirit into their wine, they reply 
very convincingly that spirit is six times dearer than 
wine, and that it is clearly to their interest to use as 
little as will keep the wine sound. 

Whether port contain much or little spirit — I am 
myself in favour of the least that is possible — it has 
one signal advantage over all other red wines of its 
high vinous quality : it is safe, it will travel, and it is 
long-lived. A man may invest in it with the con- 
fidence with which he buys into the three per cents. 
If a man buys a cask of fine burgundy in England 
and bottles it, the odds are, so far as my experience 
goes, considerably against the wine's remaining sound 
for two years. He may as well lay out his money in 
Turkish or Egyptian stock. If a man makes a similar 
investment in good claret, the odds are certainly 
greatly in favour of the wine's keeping and of its im- 
proving, at least up to a certain date ; but if a man 
invests in port wine, it is not a question of odds at 
all. Let him buy a pipe, or a hogshead, or a quarter 
cask of port wine at a fair price through a respect- 
able wine merchant and the element of chance is 
eliminated. It is an absolute certainty that the wine 
will not only keep sound but will improve in value 



PORT WINE. 267 

every year of its life. Not only is his capital safe but 
the wine will pay him interest. 

If I am asked what is a fair price, I must answer 
that, not being a wine merchant, it does not become 
me to say. 



268 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 



CHAPTEE VII. 

A PORTUGUESE TROY. 

Nature, whose mastery of hand in decorating the 
scenes, flies, and slips of her own great airy theatre, 
has been the theme of scenery-loving travellers' 
admiration from all times, is, it must be confessed, 
not seldom a very poor landscape painter. 

The tourist who passes over the river Tagus at 
Lisbon may, if he pleases, get a striking illustration 
of this fact. The ferry steamer from that city 
crosses in less than an hour the broad estuary of the 
Tagus, and lands its passengers at Barreiro, amid 
black and muddy beach waves whence the paddles 
of the boat churn up fearful exhalations. Barreiro 
is the terminus of the railway which runs eastward 
to Evora and Beja — famous cities in Eoman and in 
Moorish times, and now still goodly resorts of men — 
and southward to Setubal. 

As I was making this little voyage on my way 
to Setubal. and as the steamer neared the southern 
shores of the Tagus, I heard the words ' How fine ! ' 
break, as it were, involuntarily from the lips of an 
Engl is] 1 traveller standing by my side among the 



A PORTUGUESE TROY. 269 

crowd on board. I regarded first the view and then 
the very intelligent-looking person who had ad- 
mired it. 

' Pray,' I asked, ' do yon mean this view here in 
front of us over the shore flats, with the green 
fields and white and red houses in the distance ? ' 

' Not at all,' said the intelligent person ; ' I mean 
the one to our right, where those beautifully 
coloured red and yellow hills rise from the river edge, 
and the stone pines, growing along the hill-crest, cut 
the blue sky ; and see how the waves ripple and 
foam upon the sandy beach. Lovely ! ' Lovely ! ' 

1 easily perceived that my intelligent-looking 
acquaintance had belied his expression, and was talk- 
ing nonsense. There was indeed some little attempt 
at a picture, but the result was absolute failure. 
Nature indeed always draws correctly— so does photo- 
graphy — but of composition, harmony, effect, breadth, 
keeping, suggestiveness (the most important of all), 
there was not a trace. Offences there were against 
every canon of art, as we dwellers upon earth have 
come to lay them down. The red and yellow of the 
bare cliff-side were crude, and harmonized neither 
with sea nor sky ; the sky looked more like a newly- 
painted blue wall than the transparent vault of heaven; 
the water between us and the cliff was deplorable 
as water, it seemed distinctly convex instead of flat, as 
I have too often seen the seas and lakes of young 
amateurs in water-colour art ; the foam of the waves 
on the shore could have been represented by a line 
drawn in white chalk with a ruler. The puny stone- 



270 TORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

pines — those charming accessories in my acquaint- 
ance's eyes — were in fact no more picturesque than, 
and very like, a long row of dark-green cotton 
umbrellas opened and planted in the ground. It was 
altogether as an art-work a pitiable failure. 

As one secret of the art of being good company 
is to know less and have worse taste than one's com- 
panion, of course I expressed nothing of my views to 
the intelligent-looking person in question. If these 
pages should unfortunately fall under the eye of my 
acquaintance, if he should remember his fellow-pas- 
senger on the ferry-boat, who affably responded, 
' Ah, to be sure ! ' to his eulogy of the southern shore 
of the Tagus, he must bear him no malice, but reflect 
that thought is free and tastes may differ. 

I lost sight of my acquaintance at the station, 
Barreiro : he may have gone east ; I went south to 
Setubal. Had he been with me, I suspect that we 
should have found ourselves in most perfect accord 
in our opinion of the hideous and dreary wastes of 
country over which the train passes. Never, I think, 
anywhere have I seen agriculture fighting at such 
odds against the soil, and fighting successfully too, for 
these thin, sandy dunes, with here and there a mud 
creek, here and there a patch of rusty moorland, the 
whole flat stretch of country treeless, dreary, barren, 
inhospitable, produce the best-flavoured and most 
famous wine of Southern Portugal — the Lavradio, so 
called from the hamlet of that name, whence, too, a 
name far better known to England than the wine, 
that of IT.E. the late Count of Lavradio, the most 



A POETUGUESE TROY. 271 

popular of Portuguese ministers at the Court of St. 
James's. 

Had Dante chosen to represent the future state of 
the wicked and impenitent farmer, he might have 
placed him in some such region as that which 
we are now passing through. Mr. Arch himself 
could wish our English tenant-farmers no worse an 
Inferno ! 

Soil, sun, and wind fight against the tiller of the 
land. The soil is no more consistent than the con- 
tents of an hour-glass, the rain sinks through it with- 
out benefit. The fervid sun generates indeed some 
rare cenanthic fragrance in the grape, but its fierce- 
ness withers and kills, as I can see, half the vine 
plants in the vineyards ;' and these vineyards, what 
almost weird and dreary things they must seem to 
the first glance of eyes not used to vine growing ! 
Now in early spring there is hardly a green leaf show- 
ing, and no suggestion of the lush leafage of the 
graceful ' gadding vine,' as it shows itself on trellises 
in Italy and Northern Portugal. Hereabouts a vine- 
yard is a rough field, unenclosed save by a low sand 
mound, stuck along its ridge here and there with a 
stunted aloe or prickly pear, — a poor pretence of a 
fence, passable everywhere. The weed-grown, sandy 
expanse within is the vineyard, and at every two 
yards there uprear themselves dark twisted stumps, 
like black snakes with their heads and half their 
bodies in the air, contorted in their struggles to free 
themselves from imprisonment in the earth beneath. 
These are the vines, pruned back, and as the spring 



272 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

goes on they will put forth leaves and four or five 
weakly, yard-long shoots. 

The wheat-crops on the sandy soil are not more 
promising ; they are indeed almost ludicrous in their 
scantiness. Each seed grain has sent up but a single 
stem, quill-like in its thinness and untillered. What 
farmer could set about seriously to reap and stack 
and garner and thrash such a hollow mockery of a 
crop? Why, one might hand-pick half an acre of 
such poor stuff and carry it off like a nosegay ! A 
couple of active English gleaners might clear a field 
of it in a day, and garner it in their cottage kitchens ! 
The wind draughts passing east and west along the 
great Tagus estuary peculiarly torment this unsheltered 
plain. Hardly a tree will stand against them any- 
where, and the great reed cane, indispensable to make 
stakes for the vine plant, three times a man's height 
in more favoured localities, dwindles here to walking- 
stick size. The very instruments of labour seem to 
be such as might have been devised to add to the 
husbandman's burden of toil. The hoe is but a cubit 
long in the handle, and the worker with it must bend 
to the very earth. The blade is constructed to suit 
the soil he works in ; it is broader and a good deal 
longer than an English spade, and set on at a sharp 
angle with its handle. One sees innumerable flashes 
of these great hoes in the sun, for the toiling of 
labourers seems to be incessant, and of the load of 
dry, sandy soil lifted into the air, a third seems each 
time to run off like water before it can be turned to 
its new position, 



A PORTUGUESE TROY. 273 

Malaria hangs in the air here ; the inhabitants 
are all ague smitten — there is no mistaking the signs 
of it on their pale and haggard faces. There is 
hardly a bird or a wild flower, though the farmer 
generally is no appreciator of either. Only, for wild 
flowers, is the little moss-like wild sorrel, whose blood- 
red blossom stains the ground in broad patches as if 
real blood has just been shed on it — fit adornment 
for our Inferno. The air is quite songless, and the 
only beat of wings is when the great marsh-harrier 
or the dark-feathered buzzard flits overhead, brooding, 
as a poetical fancy might have it, like the spirit of 
evil over this curse-stricken place, and also, as the 
farmer's fears no doubt more often suggest, on the 
look-out for his stray chickens near the farmstead. 

Now, see what a cunning artist is Nature after all, 
and what force there is in contrast ! When our senses 
have become quite impenetrated with this dreary 
scene, with the stagnant mud-creeks, the tawny sand, 
showing unseemly among the straggling wheat plants, 
with the want of greenery, of shade, of growing and 
moving things — for there is not a cloud even to drop 
its shadow on the level earth — then suddenly the 
train passes through a dividing ridge, and in an instant 
we are in a new and a marvellously beautiful land. 
League-long groves of orange and lemon trees fill the 
valley, their new-shot blossoms are already showing, 
the air is full everywhere of their scent, while still 
the fair ripe fruit is hanging on the branches, ' golden 
lamps in a green night ' of leafage. The fields are 
dark green with the rank luxuriance of growing 

T 



274 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

crops. Fruit trees of every kind, peach, almond, 
pear, and cherry, are in full blossom, and every cor- 
ner of waste ground is radiant with the bloom of 
spring flowers. 

Geology is what will best explain this sudden 
transformation. We have left the alluvial sand-flats 
of some ancient sea, and are now among the rocks, 
clays and schists, sandstones and limestones of the 
oolites. Few formations have such boldly contorted 
rock-peaks, such triumphs of Nature's masonry in 
mountain and cliff, such intensely red rock surfaces, 
such perfect harmonies of greys and purples. 

On a great massive cliff in the valley is set the 
ancient Moorish stronghold of Palmella — still a strong 
place of arms — with the oblique rays of the morning 
sun slanting brightly on its square towers and tall 
battlements. Palmella commands all the six miles of 
fertile valley reaching to Setubal, which has its own 
hill fortress. Setubal lies close to the beach, and its 
white houses glitter in the sun, doubly white in their 
setting of dark green orange groves and of the clear, 
deep blue waters of the bay. Everywhere in this 
delightful landscape the earth -surface contrasts its 
pure, deep reds against the green of grass and leaf 
with surprising force of colour. Beyond everything, 
in the west, overtopping town and valley and tower 
and all lesser hills, stands the great range of the 
Arrabida, peak upon peak, till the Atlantic is 
reached ; treeless mountains showing on their nearest 
ridge the red stone softened by distance to a tender 
purple ; further off in the clefts of the mountain tops 



A PORTUGUESE TROY. 275 

are clear air-depths of exquisite ultramarine, and in 
the furthest distance of all the early morning sunlight, 
striking full upon the bare peaks and pinnacles, 
shows them powdered with pearl and gold. 

In all this scene, in its infinite variety of hill, dale, 
wood and water, in its strength of colour and bright 
airy perspectives, there is a resemblance to those 
wonderful landscapes of the early Italian masters, 
who make of such pictures a sort of epitome of 
human life — of life under the sunny skies and in the 
genial air of the golden south. We see in these 
pictures of theirs the labours of men in field and 
vineyard, wayfarers on foot and horseback along the 
roads ; the city with each dwelling in careful detail, the 
church below, the feudal castle on the cliff above, the 
flocks and herds feeding in the pastures, the winging 
of birds through the air, the winding river, the fre- 
quent bridges ; the blue, transparent waves of the sea, 
with boats and ships on it ; the fleecy clouds hanging 
aloft — all drawn with exquisite fineness of clear out- 
line and force of pure and subtle colouring ; and in 
the far distance just such peaks, pinnacles, and preci- 
pices as we have here in the Arrabida mountains. 
Such an outlook upon nature and man's work with 
nature as we get it through the art of these old painters 
is not a landscape in our narrow modern sense, but a 
panorama ; and such as I am trying to describe it do 
we get here amidst these orange-growing valleys, 
these hills and distant mountains, and this Portu- 
guese city by the clear waters of its bay. It is 
nature in the south, with its warmth, its light, its 

T 2 



276 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

brightness and its gaiety epitomized into one great 
picture. 

There are two or three inns at Setubal, and I 
happened to choose the one near the sea, a comfort- 
able enough place of lodgment ; and I will observe 
here that the wayfarer in this country need never 
much trouble himself to inquire as to the best inn. 
There is nothing very good and nothing very bad in 
a town of the size of Setubal. Competition equalizes 
the accommodation and equalizes prices. Everywhere 
one gets great civility and extraordinarily hard beds, 
abundant and not uneatable food, much dust, many 
flies, a passable wine, not very passable coffee, and 
most excellent green tea without milk, at five minutes' 
notice, day or night. One sometimes gets, to be 
sure, more — much more — than all this ; but he is a 
poor traveller who regards these unfeeable attendants 
— non ragionam di lor. 

My coming to Setubal this spring — I had passed 
through the town once before — was with the object 
of visiting the ruins of an ancient city, buried in the 
sand-hills of a low-lying promontory in the bay over 
against the town of Setubal. The site of the ruins 
has long been known, probably for five or six 
hundred years, as Troia, and I suspect that this 
curious name may date from Eenaissance times, may 
have been bestowed by the learned, a prevailing 
party in those days, and may simply have been 
equivalent to ' a place of many ruins ; ' but its first 
name, or rather its very ancient name, was, it is almost 



A PORTUGUESE TROY. 277 

certain, Cetobriga, or some variation of that name. 
Eesende, the Camden of Portugal, and the predecessor 
of our great English antiquary by a generation, is, to my 
knowledge, the first writer who has noticed these ruins. 
He describes the discovery at Troia of a statue, Eoman 
inscriptions in abundance, and the ruins of a temple 
of Jupiter Ammon. Subsequent Portuguese archae- 
ologists—there was no lack of antiquarian industry 
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — discovered 
more remains, and discoursed at still greater length 
than Eesende, the father of them all in Portugal. 
Then came the abeyance of all intellectual movement 
in this and some other countries. There came to be 
a time when there were no antiquaries even, in Por- 
tugal. While some of us woke out of our sleep 
through the eighteenth century, Portugal slept on, 
and misgoverned herself, and was a perfect Gallio of a 
country in every respect. She woke up, however, to 
most excellent purpose with the first strokes of the new 
century, to astonish the world with her capacity for 
loyalty, for patriotism, and for hard fighting, but there- 
after turned to sleep again for a while, and forgot, amid 
more important matters, all about Troia and its ruins. 
I do not know that anybody would have thought 
again about them, but that it happened that, in the 
autumn of the very year in which the last Prench 
soldier had been driven from the Peninsula — in 1814, 
that is — there came a most portentous storm of rain. 
The rivers which feed the estuary which washes 
Troia and Setubal were swollen beyond what had 
ever been known, and the floods carried away great 



278 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

lumps of the sand of the shore at Troia, and then 
again the ruins were visible, and many curious things 
were found — the skeleton of a man, a great leaden 
casket containing objects of silver, a patera, a 
candelabrum, all of silver ; and these objects were 
pronounced by the learned who saw them, and 
theorized upon them (as is and ever will be the way 
of the learned), to be Phoenician. It was not till 
1850, however, that the archaeologists bestirred them- 
selves in the matter. Then, under the patronage of 
the Duke of Palmella of that day — the Dukes of 
Palmella are great people at Setubal, and have land and 
a great palace in the neighbourhood — a society was 
formed with a long name (so long, that I forget it) to 
explore the ruins of Troia ; and subscriptions were 
raised, and the Duke headed the list ; subscribing, no 
doubt, more in energy and learning than in paltry 
money, for I find that the whole funds of the Society 
amounted to the very non-magnificent sum of 253/. 

The society was considerably more successful 
than the parsimony of its members deserved, for 
they found a great deal. Probably the ruins lay 
very thick. They began to dig on the 1st of May, 
1850, stopped on the second day of June, on account 
first of heat, then of rain, began again in the autumn 
of the same year, and exhausted their funds and their 
patience in the following March. They uncovered' a 
very perfect and very beautiful Eoman house of con- 
siderable size ; they found all that might be expected 
to be found in Eoman ruins — columns of coloured 
marble, Saguntine vases, lachrymatories and cine- 



A PORTUGUESE TROY. 279 

rary urns of glass, bronze and earthenware lamps, 
amphorae, mosaic pavements, sty la of bone, and so 
forth — all pointing to a period of later Eoman 
domination. Of coins great numbers were found, none 
Phoenician — had they existed, they would probably 
have lain at a lower level ; but Eoman coins of bronze 
to the number of about sixteen hundred. Trajan 
and Antoninus Pius were represented by one or two 
coins of each only, two only were found of Julian the 
Apostate, seventeen of Constantius Gallus, or of Con- 
stantius, three hundred and forty-one of Gratian, who 
died a.d. 383, a hundred and eighty-five of Maximus, 
who overthrew and succeeded him, and was, fi\e years 
later, overthrown by Theodosius the Great. Of 
Theodosius himself no fewer than four hundred and 
eighteen coins were found in the few months of ex- 
ploration ; of coins of his two sons, Arcadius, first 
Emperor of the East, and of the stupid Honorius, 
Emperor of the West, who reigned twenty-eight 
years and died in 423, the numbers dwindle, only 
two hundred coins having been found of each of 
them, and these are the last emperors whose coins 
were found in Troia. 

With all these facts before him, the antiquary — 
indeed, a plainer man than an antiquary — may con- 
clude with some agreeable degree of certainty that 
Cetobriga as a Eoman town flourished chiefly between 
a.d. 300 and 400, and that its decadence began soon 
after the appearance in the Peninsula of the Visi- 
gothic invaders in about 411, under their King 
Athaulf, brother-in-law to the Emperor Honorius. 



280 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

Perhaps Cetobriga did not cease to be an inhabited 
place till the time of Euric, late in the same century, 
when nearly the whole of modern Spain and Portu- 
gal fell into the hands of the Visigoths. I have not 
heard of a single Gothic coin being found, and 
certainly these barbarians were not people to care 
for a luxurious villeggiatura in the soft air and amid 
the perfumed groves of this lovely Lusitanian Baise. 

Arrived at Setubal, I bargained with two boatmen 
to take me across to Troia, intending to spend the day 
there. Returning to the inn, I found a well-dressed 
and courteous Portuguese gentleman reading, with 
the help of his eyeglass, the name on my port- 
manteau. Having acquainted himself with my name, 
he did me the honour of addressing me in the French 
tongue, and lost no time in giving me much useful in- 
formation. Setubal was a fairly civilized place, he said ; 
the streets were clean, and the authorities, on the whole, 
enlightened ; the sea-bathing was not at all bad, the 
sands smooth and firm, and the water as salt nearly as 
the ocean itself. As for Troia, which I informed him 
I was about to visit, he did not think much of it. He 
smiled contemptuously as he told me the story of the 
French company who had — as is well known to 
archaeologists — recently purchased the whole sandy 
promontory, for the sake of the finds to be made 
there. ' Much good might it do them,' was my 
acquaintance's ironical remark ; ' a foolish set of 
fellows, spending good money on a barren sandbank.' 
He had never taken the trouble to cross the water 



A PORTUGUESE TROY. 



281 



to see Troia ; it was four miles away, and it was 
quite a useless trouble, for the place was visible from 
the inn windows. He would show it to me. 

He did so, pointing out a break in the opposite 
coast-line, which seemed to rise abruptly from the 
sea to the height of from thirty to fifty feet. The 
break or gap was where a little river ran in, and to 
our left of that was a large roofless building. That 




was the ruined shrine of Our Lady of Troia : beyond 
it, a hundred yards to our left, close to the water, I 
could make out the indistinct outlines of a building ; 
that was, he told me, a house excavated forty years 
ago by the antiquaries ; it was Eoman — at least so 
they persuaded themselves ; he had never had any 



282 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

curiosity to see more of it than he could see from 
this side. 

This philosophic contempt for the ancient Komans, 
who are so bound up with the history of the town, 
and the very moderate praise accorded by my new 
acquaintance to Setubal itself, led me to apprehend 
that he was not a native of the place. It turned 
out that he was not, but had been living for some 
six years, as he informed me, at the famous town 
ofX . 

Now, the Portuguese are fuller even than we our- 
selves of wholesome local patriotism, and nearly as 
much so as the Americans. When the stage coach 
on the American frontier of Canada passes through 
the scene of those well-contested campaigns where 
our troops and our enemies scored almost exactly 
the same number of victories, it is the custom of the 
Yankee driver to ease his horses, and even to pull up 
altogether, as often as he comes to the scene of some 
American victory. 

' Here it was, gentlemen,' he cries to his passen- 
gers, ' that we whipped the Britishers in such a year. 
Down that hill did they run, horse and foot, bag and 
baggage, pursued by our brave fellows, bayonet in 
hand.' But whenever the place of a British victory 
is reached, the coachman holds his team well together, 
cracks his whip, whistles to his horses, and gallops 
past it at so fearful a pace that even if there be a 
Britisher or two on the coach, or perchance an 
American with an historical conscience, the jolting 
and the holding on to their seats for bare life deprive 



A PORTUGUESE TROY. 283 

them of all power of speech and remonstrance against 
this one-sided mode of illustrating history. 

I can imagine a Portuguese coachman capable of 
this amiable Chauvinism ; but to speak the plain 
truth, he would very seldom have occasion to hurry 
his horses — many are the fields of battle, and very 
few the scenes of Portuguese defeat. The Portu- 
guese love to dwell on the great victories of their 
forefathers, and certainly they do very well, to keep 
green the memory of those splendid achievements 
which have won them, against enormous odds, freedom 
and an enduring national existence ; and they like (as 
we like) to be reminded now and then of these great 
feats. So it was that when my acquaintance at the 
inn informed me that he was connected with the town 

of X , I alluded, almost as a matter of course, to 

its fame as the scene of a great Portuguese victory ; 
it being, indeed, the best authenticated of all their 
early triumphs over the Moors. 

I was wrong ; my friend was a philosopher, and I 
should like to believe that his impartial philoso- 
phic standpoint, and that of many Continental free- 
thinkers who resemble him, was based on any broad 
acquaintance with either the past or the present. 

When I spoke of the connection of X with 

this famous historical event, he smiled, and was silent 
for a moment ; then he spoke : — 

4 II faut avouer, Monsieur, que les anciens ont dit 
beaucoup de sottises sur ces choses-la.' 

4 We must forgive them,' I suggested, ' in con- 
sideration of the paucity of their lights.' 



284 POKTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

4 The report is,' lie asked, cautiously feeling his 

way, 4 of some great victory at X over the 

Eomans. Is that not it ? ' 

' The report I have heard is not quite to that 
effect, but it comes, after all, to very nearly the same 
thing in the end.' 

We parted with protestations of mutual respect. 

It took us over an hour to cross the bay with a 
light wind from the north, and, at the boatmen's 
desire, we landed to the west of the little stream 
before described, to fill their jar with water, which 
they maintain to be better than any in Setubal. I 
followed the boatmen a quarter of a mile through 
the strangest vegetation that I have ever seen in 
Portugal. I found myself like a man new landed in 
some unknown island. We passed through a grove 
of a tall, broom-like, very graceful shrub some twelve 
or fifteen feet in height, bearing racemes of a whitish 
flower, not unlike laburnum in shape, and having a 
delightful scent. All the trees of it were in full 
blossom, and the air was heavy with a spring-like 
perfume. Innumerable small butterflies of a pretty 
brown and yellow kind fluttered in the air, the large 
harmless ringed snake of Portugal glided among the 
roots of these shrubs, and every smaller bush held 
one or two large grey sand lizards. The ground 
in places was almost covered with a dull brown 
scarabams beetle, the size of a sixpence. 

When we had reached the top of the bank of 
hard sandy soil which commences to rise from the 



A PORTUGUESE TROY. 285 

water's edge, I found that I was looking down upon a 
little plain some half mile across, surrounded and 
protected on all sides by a similar bank or rim of 
shrub-covered sand hills. In its centre was a lagoon, 
tenanted by water and shore birds, and all round it 
meadows firm to the tread and brightly green, not 
with grass, but a thick growth of some compact, 
aromatic shrub. March and April are the months 
for wild-flowers in Portugal, and the ground was 
enamelled, like a rich cloisonne, with the blossoms of 
many familiar bulbous and other vernal plants, con- 
spicuous among the latter the red and yellow tufts of 
the rock rose ; but there were flowers here whose pre- 
sence, till I learnt to account for it, was a complete 
puzzle to me. There were roods upon roods of ground, 
sloping to the south, thickly overgrown with a 
prickly shrub, bearing flower and fruit together — 
the large, star-like flower a dull blue, the fruit, of 
plum size, a gay orange in colour, and so abundant 
as to give a very distinct local colouring to the whole 
landscape. This shrub, unless I am mistaken, is the 
common mad-apple of the East Indies, 1 but the most 
striking plant was a free-flowering one of lowly 

1 ' The mad-apple of the East Indies,' Solanum insanum. It 
has become a sea-shore weed in most tropical and sub-tropical 
countries, east and west. The large brown lizard I saw was the 
Amphisboena drier ea, whose European habitat is almost confined 
to Portugal. The snake at Troia was the common and harmless 
Coluber natrix. The butterfly I saw was one of the genus termed 
by entomologists Skippers, but I did not recognise the species. 
The bulbous and tuberous rooted plants of Portugal are so innu- 
merable that I will not attempt to begin to name them. The 
scarabseus beetle I cannot give a name to. 



286 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

growth, the flower a deep, pure blue — that colour so 
rare in our gardens — and so free a bloomer that 
every tuft of it glowed like a bit of southern sky. 
The plant is of the family of the Boraginaceas ; more 
than that I cannot say, for I never saw it before or 
since, nor have I found anyone who has seen or 
knows it, or can name it. Besides this blue flower I 
found many other plants, in and out of bloom, which 
were absolutely new to me. 

The solution of the problem of the congregation 
on this little headland of so much variety and such 
luxuriance of plant growth is very simple. Setubal 
is resorted to by vessels coming for cargoes of salt 
from all "parts of the world, for they make here the 
best bay salt known anywhere. These vessels often 
come in ballast, that ballast is generally sand or 
gravel, and before loading with salt they have to dis- 
charge it. Formerly they threw it into the sea near 
their moorings, but this practice was gradually shoal- 
ing the harbour, and by a recent order of the harbour 
authorities, the ballast has to be carried across the 
estuary in lighters, and discharged high and dry on 
the beach at Troia. My boatmen told me this, and I 
saw myself the heaps of sand ballast on the shore. 
Containing as it must a variety of seeds and germs 
and eggs of insects from all the corners of the habita- 
ble world, a most interesting experiment in acclima- 
tization is thus being carried on. I have no doubt 
that half the plants I saw at Troia were exotic. It 
docs not follow that they would thrive elsewhere in 
Portugal than at Troia, for both soil and climate and 



A PORTUGUESE TROY. 287 

exposure favour them greatly. It lies nearly on the 
38th parallel, but its climate is milder even than that 
summery degree of latitude, for it is protected from 
the north not only by the great Estrella range which 
ends at Cintra, just north of Lisbon, and modifies the 
whole climate of Southern Portugal, but it is abso- 
lutely cut off by the tall Arrabida hills from every 
breath of northerly winds, and therefore must enjoy 
a climate very far superior to that of Lisbon. 

I lost a great deal of valuable time in wandering 
about this interesting valley, and I could pleasantly 
have spent days there. Every fresh step showed me 
some new and strange plant growth : aromatic shrubs 
in great variety ; here a curious grey lichen standing 
up from the ground like turf, three or four inches 
high, and so rigid in its substance and fibre as to 
bear a man's weight without bending ; there a 
creeping plant not yet in flower, with a pointed leaf 
quite unknown to me in shape. I walked half round 
the lagoon, watching the gobies and the bright-finned 
gurnets darting to and fro in its clear, brackish water, 
the dunlins and sandpipers in flocks by the shore, 
the solitary heron angling in the farthest corner, the 
little white-winged terns hovering over, and ever and 
anon dipping with an audible splash into its smooth 
surface ; then I turned back to the boat, and we set 
sail, running up the shore to Cetobriga. 

I took a piece of bread and began to eat, wishing 
to lose no time, and my boatmen too got out their 
provisions, and hospitably asked me to join in their 
dinner of cold fried fish. I did, and found it very good. 



288 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

i I see, 5 I said, ' that you gentlemen who follow 
the sea live very well ; your bread is of the whitest 
flour, your wine is as good as a man need wish for, 
and as for your fried fish, one might look in vain for 
anything better all over Lisbon itself.' 

' We are poor men, your Excellency,' said the 
more lively of the two boatmen, ' but we work hard ; 
and it is true we gain money, but we spend it again 
as quickly. And your Excellency may think that 
my brother-in-law and I, being owners of this good 
boat, with sail and mast and rudder, might be proud 
and lazy, but that is not so at all, for as often as God 
sends us work to do and money to gain, so often do 
we set to, heart and soul, to gain it. It is not every 
day that we have a rich English or Eussian Lord 
Captain who wants to run down in our boat to the 
Arrabida Convent, or up the Bay to the salt pans, 
nor can we use our nets and catch fish every week. 
Then we take a few days at unloading salt into the 
holds of the foreign ships, or we work at salt making 
till something better turns up.' 

4 You are certainly the best kind of men in the 
world,' I replied, not without conviction, ' and I 
heartily wish there were more like you.' 

Compliments are never wasted on a Portuguese, 
and he started anew in his discourse. 

6 So it is that we eat well, drink well, and lodge 
well ; but if your Excellency thinks that this wine 
has a good flavour, and this fish is good, what would 
you think of our way of living when some thirty or 
forty of us have come from the sea-fishing and stop our 



A PORTUGUESE TROY. 289 

boats yonder under the Arrabida hill, where we have 
built ourselves a square, walled enclosure. Then we 
take of the best and freshest of our catch, light our 
fires, cook our fish, and eat it — not as this is, cold 
and tasteless, but quite hot and steaming, and for 
sauce we squeeze over it the juice of fresh lemons, 
which this is without ; and instead of this wine, which 
is a fair enough liquor, and which comes from Alferva 
near the town, then do we drink no wine but that 
which grows on the Arrabida itself, which is a wine 
of the mountains, and twice as good as this. Thus 
do we feast and make merry when we come back 
from the sea-fishing ; and I can assure your Excel- 
lency that even the Duke of Palmella himself in his 
great palace does not fare better than we do, nor 
even the Lord Captain of the English brig there, now 
loading in the harbour, even when he sits down in the 
saloon of his ship to a table covered with white linen, 
and has china plates and dishes, and sailors in gilt 
buttons to wait upon him, and many crystal glasses 
and bottles beside him, as I have seen these Lord 
Captains do scores of times with my own eyes.' 

Thus it was that I became acquainted with the 
ways of polite society, native and foreign, at Setu- 
bal. 

As my boatman was thus developing his views 
with a fulness of diction which I am hardly attempt- 
ing to reproduce, and with a wealth of ajypropriate 
gesture which added greatly to the charm of his 
conversation, I was drawing most interesting ethno- 
logical conclusions from his manners, and from his 

u 



290 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

dress, and from the cast of his features. His dress 
was simple, and one might fancy that but a very few 
days' work with a salt shovel in the ship of a foreign 
'Lord Captain' would purchase a whole suit of clothes. 
A white linen shirt, a pair of loose blue cotton trousers 
reaching to just below the knee, and a scarlet sash 
wound three times round his waist, with a red Nea- 
politan cap, made up this light and picturesque 
costume. No doubt he had a hooded cloak of brown 
Saragoca cloth at home, for winter wear and sea- 
going ; but the only extra clothing I observed, the 
only great-coat (if I may venture on such a bull), was 
a pair of cloth trousers thrown under the seat of the 
boat, for use in case of wet or cold. 

Every antiquary will allow the Oriental character 
of this dress, and not even an antiquary could dispute 
the perfectly Eastern cast of my head boatman's very 
handsome face, with his thin, well-cut features, large 
and piercing eyes, smooth skin, and dark, olive com- 
plexion. If there is any truth at all in hereditary 
physiognomy, he was a Phoenician of pure lineage ; 
and the archseologist who reads this will be glad to 
have this confirmation of the hypothesis, which I 
know he has already made, as to the Phoenician origin 
of Cetobriga from the presence in that word of the 
undeniably Phoenician ' ceto,' ' citho,' or ' sytho ' (the 
learned spell it in all three ways), together with the 
mention of Phoenician colonization on this coast by 
the early writers. My second boatman, on the other 
hand, the companion and brother-in-law of my Phoe- 
nician acquaintance, was, on the evidence of his round 



A PORTUGUESE TROY. 291 

face, high cheek bones and blunt features, his easy 
temper and slower intelligence, a pure Yisigoth. 

I am sorry to perceive, in the interests of compar- 
ative ethnology, that the two races are beginning to 
commingle at Setubal. It is, however, satisfactory to 
observe that if in the old times the primitive Phoe- 
nician colonists, and even the Eomans of Cetobriga 
themselves, had to submit to Enric and his Goths, the 
tables have at last been turned ; the Phoenician was 
the better man of the two, and his ascendency over 
his Gothic companion was satisfactorily complete. It 
is clear, indeed, from all history that numbers only 
ever made my second boatman's progenitors formid- 
able — overwhelming numbers and a servile habit of 
discipline — just as certain modern Goths in a recent 
great war in Western Europe owed their triumphs 
over better men to these very two circumstances. 

While I was thus agreeably generalizing and play- 
ing at archaeology, our boat presently reached this 
Portuguese Troy. 

A Spanish proverb says :— 

1 La sciencia es locura, 
Si buen senso no la ciira ; ' 

which may very properly be translated, ' Most 
savants (especially antiquaries) are a little wrong in 
the head.' Notwithstanding which warning, it is 
incumbent on me to theorize a little before introduc- 
ing the reader to these ruins of Cetobriga. 

First, we want a hypothesis to account for the fact 
that any people should have made a settlement on 
this absolutely barren headland, when the good, fertile 

u 2 



292 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

shore of Setubal was apparently ready to receive 
them. So far as the Phoenicians are concerned, if 
they were the first colonists it is indeed quite intel- 
ligible that a handful of traders coming to make a 
settlement should choose this narrow tongue of land, 
surrounded by the element of which they had the 
full command. To account for the presence of the 
Eomans here, we must theorize more boldly. 

Now, I think we may safely guess first that the 
high bank of sand which now rises, almost abruptly, 
not quite from the water's edge, but from the narrow 
beach a few yards in width, did not exist in Eoman 
times. It is an accumulation — geologists may settle 
how formed — of quite recent date ; and it was the acci- 
dental removal by a high flood of some of this accumu- 
lation which revealed, as I have told, the existence of 
the ruins in 1814. Pompeii is covered about fifteen 
feet in height by the sand and ashes from a volcano ; 
Cetobriga is similarly embedded in mounds of testa- 
ceous sand, brought either by the winds or the waves. 

When the Duke of Palmella's Society made their 
excavations they simply removed this sand from the 
top, and came in time to the roof, or the place where 
it had been, then they laid bare the upper story, then 
the ground floor. It is a plain well-built house of 
rubble stone, with courses of thin brick. The mortar 
is a strong cement, such as the Eomans well knew, 
the secret of preparing ; and it is noteworthy that an 
excellent hydraulic cement, identical I believe with 
that used in this house, is obtained to this day in the 
Arrabida hills. 



A PORTUGUESE TROY. 293 

If the whole of the sand dune which lies along the 
water's edge at Troia could be removed, we should 
undoubtedly have revealed to us the ancient Eoman 
town of Cetobriga, in probably a very fair state of 
preservation. The sand removed, there is reason to 
suppose that the peninsula on which the ruins stand 
was good fertile land, for I found the level ground on 
which the house was built to be a deep loamy soil, 
quite capable of growing plants and trees. Then 
again, unlike Pompeii, from which the sea has 
retreated a mile, at Cetobriga the sea has encroached 
upon and greatly narrowed the land. Through the 
clear ar>d shallow waters of the bay, one sees the 
debris of walls, bricks, tiles and masses of concrete, 
for thirty or forty yards from the shore. The exca- 
vated house faces the bay, and its front door is not 
ten yards from the water's edge, and not half that 
height above it. There was probably in former times 
an intervening shingly beach fifty or sixty yards in 
width. 

Having examined the house itself, which seemed 
to me larger and loftier than the ordinary houses in 
the Pompeii streets, I walked some three quarters of 
a mile along the shore, finding the same lofty sand 
dune rising everywhere from the beach, well covered 
with shrubs and flowering plants ; and, in places 
where the sand had been washed away by the great 
floods of last autumn, there were visible portions of 
Eoman wall, of archways and vaults, showing how 
rich would be the result of even a few days' hard 
work with pick and shovel. This walk along the 



294 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

beach was, I have no doubt, a sort of marine parade 
of the town. The best houses were ' sea-view resi- 
dences,' as the Brighton lodging-house keepers say, 
and this part, no doubt, a gay enough place in old 
Eoman times. 

On the beach there lie innumerable remains of 
shallow reservoirs or receptacles, from ten to fifteen 
feet long and from five to ten broad, and about four 
or five feet in depth. They are built with good 
foundations in the ground, of concrete, and are 
finished off very smoothly with cement inside. Any- 
one who knows that the Eomans were a luxurious 
people fond of sea-bathing, would come to the conclu- 
sion that these shallow cisterns were baths ; he would 
even think the device a most happy one, where the 
bottom of the sea, as it is here, is shingly. But the 
learned never arrive at an obvious conclusion, and 
the weighty Hiibner * is of opinion that these recep- 
tacles were used for the curing of fish. 

1 ' The weighty Hiibner.' I use this epithet advisedly. Herr 
HUbner's voluminous work, the ' Corpus Inscriptionum Lati- 
narum,' is (so far as a traveller not unused to the powers of pack 
animals can judge) more than a load for the strongest mule. It 
is also much more than a load for the strongest reader. The 
learned German consents to the conclusion arrived at long before 
by Resende that the remains of Troia are the ancient Oetobriga, 
and that Cetobriga was a place of considerable importance. ' Sig- 
norum nonullorum,' he says, 'reliquiae, nummi Uteris indigenis 
inscripti, supellex ex auro argentove facta saepius ibi reperta et 
edificiorum cum aliorum turn officinarum salsamentariarum prope 
litus sitarum rudera oppidum olim fuisse non ignobile demonstrant, 
quod ipse testis oculatus affirmo.' I cannot, however, bring 
myself to believe that tho dwellers in Cetobriga could have con- 
sented to have so disagreeable an operation as the salting of fish 



A PORTUGUESE TROY. 295 

Though so very little work of exploration has been 
done at Troia, we can thus, as will have been seen, 
make a very plausible guess as to what Cetobriga 
was and till when it lasted. As to its founders, its 
name, preserved with no great change in the modern 
Setubal, tells us something ; Ceto is perhaps Phoe- 
nician, and briga, the termination, is almost certainly 
Celtic, or what generally passes for Celtic. The 
traveller may, if he lends himself thereto with proper 
anthropological enthusiasm, find in the lineaments of 
the people and in the dress of the fishing population, 
at least some confirmation of the Eastern derivation 
of its inhabitants. I hope no sceptic will attempt 
seriously to deny the Phoenician origin of Cetobriga, 
for we archaeologists — the most generally reasonable 
and open to conviction of all men — are peculiarly 
tenacious when it conies to believing in the presence 
of the Phoenicians. In this case there is really more 
to go upon than the vague conclusions of philology 
or those, quite as vague perhaps, to be drawn from 
the features of the population. 

Strabo, as all hard readers know, has told us of 
the traffic of the Phoenicians, those bold seafaring 
traders, along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts 
of Spain and Portugal. Avienus corroborates him. 

carried on under the windows of their best houses, and on ground 
which must have been more valuable than any other in the head- 
land. Moreover, the receptacles, in size, shape and position, are not 
in any way fitted to the curing of fish . I hold strongly to the bath 
theory, and if an alternative one is required, I would rather be- 
lieve that these cisterns were small vivaria — aquaria, as we should 
now call them — for the preservation for a time of living sea-fish. 



296 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

We learn that they established trading stations — ■ 
' factories,' or assemblages of factors or agents, such 
as we ourselves used to have all over the world — in 
Portugal as well as elsewhere. Herein our Phoenician 
hypothesis is very pleasantly supported by such facts 
as we have on the authority of the old writers. 1 The 
Turduli, they say, inhabit the coasts of Portugal from 
the Tagus northward to the Douro. The Bastuli are 
settled between the Tagus (which lies but fifteen miles 
north of Troia) and the Guadiana — a stretch of rich 
and beautiful coast ; the soil fruitful, rivers abundant, 
harbours many, and the air soft and balmy. The 
question of course is, Who were the Bastuli ? and the 
answer is, Almost certainly a Phoenician race. They 
probably came to Portugal from Carthage or its neigh- 
bourhood. Ptolemy calls them Bastuli-peni. What 
more can an antiquarian want in the nature of corro- 
boration? Strabo goes even further to help us to 
identify the founders of Cetobriga, for he speaks 
particularly of certain Bastuli who lived upon a 
narrow strait of land near the sea. Now, looking in 
the map at the whole line of sea-coast between the 
Tagus and the Guadiana, which the geographers give 
to the Bastuli, I find but one such tongue of land as 
Strabo describes: it is Troia itself. In addition to all 
this evidence, Phoenician coins have been dug up at 
Cetobriga. That good and diligent Portuguese anti- , 
quary, Gama Xaro, found one there which bears on 
its obverse a head in profile which, if the coin is 
Cetobrigan, gives us a poor idea of the looks and 
1 Pliny and Pomponins Mela. 



A PORTUGUESE TROY. 297 

amiability of its inhabitants ; on its reverse are two 
dolphins or perhaps porpoises. Porpoises might well 
be l. ,ade symbols of Cetobriga, for in its Bay they are 
always to be seen playing and leaping through the 
waves. The people call them golfinios. 

I explored to the best of my ability at Troia ; 
passing over, as non-Roman, a house on the south-west 
side of the headland facing the little river, said by my 
boatmen to have been dug out by the French explor- 
ing company. It seemed to me to be a large barn- 
like building, not more than three or four centuries 
old. I found buried a few inches below the surface 
on which its foundations are built, fragments of green 
glazed pottery which cannot, according to our exist- 
ing knowledge of the potter's art, be of an earlier 
date than the twelfth or thirteenth century. 

When I had done my clay's work — a hard one 
under the perpendicular rays of the Setubal sun — I 
was induced to sail across the Bay to the Arrabida 
mountains before nightfall, so tempting did the bright 
waters of the Bay look, and the hills themselves 
in the already slanting sun rays, with their colours 
and their brightness so splendidly intensified, standing 
up before me in the rich western light, like huge cliffs 
and peaks of various translucent gems — opal and 
amethyst, garnet and chrysolite. 

We ran over the five or six miles very quickly 
with a fresh breeze, and landed at the nearest point ; 
and I took directions from my boatmen as to how I 
was to reach a particular lofty peak of rock : — ' Your 
Excellency will pass through the orange groves till 



\ 



298 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

they end on the hill-side, and there is a vineyard, and 
after that a clump of olive trees which you can see 
from here ; then you are on the bare hill-side, and 
you walk straight up till you come to a ruined 

hermitage ; keep that to the right ' or to the left, 

it may have been, for, like most other people, I 
suppose, I invariably forget such directions one 
minute after I have heard them. 

I am inclined to think that on the southern slopes 
of these Arrabida hills may be found a climate 
warmer and more healthy — for there is no marsh- 
land about — than any spot in the whole of Portugal. 
Here the monks — a body of Grey Friars, an order 
always judicious in their choice of sites — set up an 
important monastery. There is a story, too, of a 
young man, a native of Lisbon, who, having been sent 
to Madeira for a chest complaint, returned from that 
island not bettered in health. As a last resource, his 
friends sent him to the Arrabida. There he bought 
a goatherd's house, with his goats, living summer and 
winter in the former, and mainly on the produce of 
the latter. His health came back to him, and he 
lives there still, offering, hermit-like, to chance 
visitors to his mountain, shelter and a share of his 
simple fare. This is the story as I heard it from 
several people. I did not see him. 

Another testimony to the geniality of this climate 
is that Brotero, the Portuguese botanist, gives the 
Arrabida range as the sole habitat of many Portuguese 
plants which grow nowhere else in Europe. I did 
not, indeed, in my very hurried walk, find any plants 



A PORTUGUESE TROY. 299 

that were new to me, though the ground was carpeted 
with spring flowers ; and I noticed that none of the 
strange plant growths of the Troia headland were to 
be found here. 

It was nightfall when I reached the bottom of the 
hill, and nine o'clock before our boat got back to 
Setubal. I was very tired and hungry, and glad to 
remember that a conference had taken place that 
morning between the cook and myself, which had 
ended in that very affable person promising to have 
dinner ready for me at whatever hour of the evening 
or night I might return. He kept his word : and I 
hope no one at Senhor Escoven's inn may ever fare 
worse than I did that night. 

A party of burgesses, worthy people, probably 
from the capital, were supping with some of their 
friends at the table d'hote as I came in. A man is never 
so critical as in the ten minutes before his dinner, and 
my chance table-mates must set down my cynical 
contemplation, of them to this circumstance. 

An English master of the art of social well-doing 
has laid down the maxim that no man should ever 
monopolise the conversation for more than half a 
minute. (I myself think the time is too long.) The 
Portuguese do not adopt this rule, and in truth I 
have never sojourned among the people who do. 
Among the supper party at Setubal two gentlemen 
strove with each other as to which of them should break 
it most completely. When two well-known French 
orators, members of the Legislature, were contending 



300 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

for the ear of that assembly, the one who had lost it for 
the moment smiled pleasantly upon the audience during 
the flowing rhetoric of his rival, conscious of his own 
latent power of talk, contenting himself with remark- 
ing behind his hand, ' S'il crache, il est perdu ! ' I 
noticed something of this polite self-confidence in that 
one of the two Portuguese gentlemen who happened 
for the moment to be silent. The rest of the party — 
terrible conversationalists too, after their kind, I dare 
say, some of them — were witnesses and seconds only 
while this duel of talk was proceeding, merely smiling 
or nodding, or being properly moved or indignant, as 
was required of them. 

The night was pleasant, yet several of the party 
had woollen comforters on. Some of the women wore 
worsted knitted hoods and were discordantly dressed ; 
men and women leant slouchingly over the table, 
curving their elbows and hands and wrists half round 
their plates (so do crabs and lobsters, I believe, at 
their own ocean dinner-tables curve unwieldy claws 
round their food) ; and these otherwise pleasant ladies 
and gentlemen might well seem to the straight-backed 
Briton, taught not to let his elbows stray at meal 
times too far from his sides, to be departing not a 
little from the proprieties to be observed at table. 
How easy is intolerance in such matters, and how 
poor and miserable the triumph of finding food for 
frivolous laughter in such trifling differences as these ! 
How few of my countrymen would think of setting 
against all this the fact that one bottle of port wine 
had sufficed for the whole party of twelve, and that 



A PORTUGUESE TROY. 

it was but half emptied ; or that every man of the 
party showed his wish to be gracious by bowing, as 
he rose from the table, to the stranger who had sat 
at meat with him. 

On the other hand, it would have been a truly 
ridiculous thing for a newly-landed tourist, had one 
been there, to see that as the two sections of the party 
took leave of each other, they did so in a manner to 
offend and even to excruciate all our insular suscep- 
tibilities. The women kissed each other — and this in- 
deed might pass — but the men likewise embraced ; 
and this really was too great an outrage on a critical 
British traveller waiting for his dinner. The Portuguese 
of the male sex, when they meet after absence and when 
they part for any time, rush into each other's arms as 
people in England do nowhere but on the transpon- 
tine stage. They are a thickset population, and they 
perform the ludicrous act not without a certain burly 
dignity, and yet tenderly too ; not, I must say for 
them, kissing each other on their too often chubby 
cheeks, as I have seen Italians and Southern French- 
men do ; but when they find themselves in each 
other's arms they thump each other gently on the 
back in token of amity ; anon each draws back his 
head and contemplates his friend's countenance, 
pleasantly with smiles if meeting, mournfully and 
tearfully if about to part. 

It is easy to laugh at all this, but it is an old 
custom in Portugal. There is nothing really 
effeminate in the usage any more than in those who 
practise it. Heroes have done it ere now. ]S T ot 




302 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

otherwise, be sure, was the great Yasco da Gama 
clasped in the arms of his friends when he came 
back, having, after perils innumerable, doubled the 
Cape and found the sea route to the Indies. In no 
other fashion, I am certain, did the still greater 
Prince Henry the Navigator embrace the famous sea 
commanders who had carried his exploring ships 
into unknown recesses of the mysterious ocean, 
thumping their brave backs with friendly gratitude 
and enthusiasm. 

How we English shake our honest sides, seeing 
for the first time this Portuguese amplexus, with all 
its queer accompaniments ; yet what a foolish and 
insular thing it is to laugh — not so very insular 
indeed, after all, for we used to do the very same 
thing in this country. ' Come ! Let my bosom touch 
thee,' says a chief character in one of our old comedies 
to two other personages in no very affluent circum- 
stances. How much would I — boasting myself to be 
somewhat of a citizen of the world — like to see a 
revival of this good, hearty, old-fashioned custom of 
the accolade ! How pleasant would it be to see 
some padded, gouty old general running up in Pall 
Mall to a half-pay subaltern, the friend and mess- 
mate of his youth ; or some goodly bishop, sleek with 
episcopal honours, meeting an old college friend of 
forty years' standing, still a curate. ' Come ! ' would 
his lordship exclaim, standing with extended arms in 
Waterloo Place, ' Come ! Let my bosom touch thee.' 

Except for the trifling circumstance that the bed- 






\ 



A PORTUGUESE TROY. 303 

rooms of Sr. Escoven's hotel were constructed with 
such an economy of partition wall that they only 
reached three parts of the way to the ceiling, nothing 
could be more satisfactory to the most exacting 
tourist than the arrangements of his hostelry. Even 
this peculiarity of mural construction has some advan- 
tages. The bedded traveller is indeed only screened, 
not walled off from Sr. Escoven's other guests ; but 
the Portuguese are essentially a sociable people, and 
by this simple device the pleasures of conversation 
may be enjoyed far on into the night. There is also 
a pleasant flavour of medievalism about it. Exactly in 
this fashion, as I have read, were the guest chambers 
disposed in those great semi-ecclesiastical hospices 
which in the Middle Ages occupied the places now so 
much more comfortably filled by the modern hotel. 

I do not dwell on this detail of arrangement as 
blameworthy ; and, on the other hand, the way in 
which at the Setubal inn the traveller's bill is de- 
livered to him is, in regard to rapidity of presenta- 
tion, simplicity of statement, and reasonableness of 
amount, worthy of all praise. As civilisation goes 
on, the mauvais quart oVheure of Eabelais has become 
a more and more disagreeable interval of time. It is 
not the exorbitance of the amount which irritates us, 
for we are, I trust, my readers and I, fairly solvent 
people — so much as the delays in getting our 
accounts given to us (with a train just starting, 
perhaps, or an appointment to keep), and their un- 
necessary complication when they are given. There 
is also cause for great exasperation in the now too 



304 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

common habit of English hotel-keepers of having a 
printed form on which the plain requirements of a 
simple traveller are lost amid a multitude of items 
which he might, could, and — as the bill and its 
author clearly suggest — should have ordered. So 
that when a guest pays his bill for a day's and night's 
lodging, he is positively almost ashamed at finding 
due registry of his having wanted neither liqueurs, 
nor stationery, nor warm baths, nor douche baths, 
nor shower baths, nor pots of jam, nor carriages and 
pairs, nor draught stout, nor imperial pints of pale 
ale, nor ginger beer, nor the hotel hairdresser, nor 
mulled wine at night, nor sherry bitters by day ; and 
he reflects what a poor shuffling impostor of a guest 
he is to have had so few requirements. 

What may be called the antipodes of this magni- 
ficent and pretentious kind of hotel account prevails 
at some of the remoter inns in Portugal. Here, 
when the traveller asks for his bill, the landlord 
pleasantly rubs his hands together and answers, 
' Whatever your Excellency pleases to give.' This 
will not do at all, for the traveller is sure to offer too 
much or too little, and to be thought either a spend- 
thrift or a niggard ; so he has to make a speech, 
thank the landlord for his courteous confidence, and 
beg for a detailed statement. 

Then the landlord, politely deprecating any-, 
thing of the kind, is slowly persuaded to check off 
the various items upon the fingers of his hand, with 
a long argument before each successive finger is done 
with and doubled down. 



A PORTUGUESE TROY, 305 

' What does it come to ? ' asks the traveller, taking 
out his purse at last, when the hand and the account 
are finally closed. 

8 Diacho ! ' (which is polite for Diabo, which again 
is contracted from the Latin). ' Did his Excellency 
not add up ? ' 

His Excellency having been incapable of this act 
of mental arithmetic, the addition is gone over again, 
from the little finger backwards, with a finger or two, 
perhaps, representing forgotten items, brought into 
account from the other hand ; and the sum total is 
gladly paid, and host and guest part mutually content 
— the guest well knowing that he has not been over- 
charged more than perhaps a thumb and one or two 
fingers. 

At Sr. Escoven's inn the bill is drawn up and 
presented in a manner which may be called a com- 
promise between these two opposite systems of ac- 
count, and is an improvement on each. As I am 
writing as a traveller and for travellers, I can do no 
better than give full particulars. 

At six o'clock a.m., I asked the woman servant, 
who was bringing my breakfast, for my bill. In less 
than two minutes it was placed on the table before 
me, written on a piece of paper two inches square. 
It contained only the following figures : — 

1.500 
1.500 



3.000 



The waitress, placing her finger on the second 

x 



306 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

1.500, reminded me that this sum had been advanced 
to me by the landlord the night before to pay my 
boatmen. The rest, she said, was my inn account. 
1.500 reis is a milrei and a half, and a milrei and a 
half is about six shillings and eightpence, this sum 
representing the whole charge for bread and wine to 
take with me to Troia, dinner, bed, and breakfast 
next morning. There was no charge for the conver- 
sation on both sides of me, which lasted half through 
the night. 

I have written this account of a thirty-six hours' 
expedition from Lisbon, made hurriedly between two 
engagements, because I have often heard it said that 
little or nothing was to be done or seen from the 
capital of Portugal. I hope I have shown that a 
traveller following me in this little expedition need 
expend neither much time or trouble to find himself 
among very beautiful scenery and an interesting and 
courteous people. The Arrabida range, small as it 
comparatively is, has peaks and recesses which would 
well repay a visit of days. Setubal itself, of which I 
have said hardly a word, is in population the third or 
fourth city in the kingdom, and lias antiquities of its 
own. The estuaries of the Sado and the Marateca, 
forming the Bay of Setubal, are a congregation of 
waters more beautiful than any in Portugal, not ex- 
cepting the estuary of the Tagus itself ; and upon it, 
within easy reach by boat, are towns famous in the 
history of ancient Portugal. 



;or 



CHAPTEE VIII. 

THE LOST CITY OF CITANIA. 

Ten years ago, locomotion in Portugal was cer- 
tainly neither easy nor pleasant. Within that period, 
however, railways have increased, and a multitude of 
good high-roads have opened up many new and 
interesting districts which were once only accessible on 
horseback. In almost all the larger towns excellent 
inns have taken the place of execrably bad ones. 
Moreover, a system of transit has been established by 
a public company, under the name of the Companhia 
da Viacao do Minho^ which affords great facilities to 
the traveller. In all the principal cities and towns of 
Northern Portugal, offices of this company are to be 
found where, at a moment's notice, any sort of car- 
riage can be obtained, from a roomy covered caleche 
to a light phaeton : and the company having a well- 
organized system of correspondence between their 
various stations, the traveller can order a carriage to 
meet him at the most remote point of the Northern 
Province, with a reasonable expectation of not being 
disappointed. 

It will be tolerably evident that I am describing 
what is, when combined with the lovely scenery of 

x 2 



308 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

Portugal and numerous points of interest of every 
kind, nothing less than a paradise of tourists. That 
it may seem still more one, the country still more 
accessible and still more civilized, the reader shall 
learn something about Portuguese railways. 

As regards the railway system of the country, it 
is as yet very simple, consisting of one direct main 
line of communication between Lisbon in the South of 
the Kingdom, and Oporto in the North. From each 
of these termini, or rather centres, there diverge 
short branch lines, or feelers, which are still, except 
at two points in the South, unconnected with the rail- 
way system of the rest of the Peninsula, and which 
are for the most part in process of annual extension. 

It is along one of these branch lines, and the 
newest of them all, the railway opened within the 
last few months northward to Braga and thence 
to the Spanish frontier, that I am about to conduct 
the reader. Though the distance from Lisbon to 
Oporto is very nearly that between Liverpool and 
London, the time employed for the journey in Portugal 
is considerably more than double ; and as competition 
may be called the soul of brevity in railway matters, 
and there is quite certain to be no competition in 
Portugal for the next hundred years, Lisbon and 
Oporto may, for all intents and purposes, be con- 
sidered to be, not two hundred, but four hundred 
miles apart. 

I pass over this journey without comment, for my 
present purpose is to visit, first Braga, the archiepis- 
copal city, and afterwards Guimaraens, famous in the 



THE LOST CITY OF CITANIA. 309 

history of mediaeval Portugal, and to find, and when 
found, to explore and make notes of, a mysterious 
buried town, supposed to lie somewhere between 
these two cities, and of which a great deal more 
presently. 

The Minho Province is, as everyone knows who 
has ever opened a book upon Portugal — even a 
guide-book (blind enough guides, too often) — is, I 
say, as everyone knows, the most lovely portion of 
Portugal. The traveller from Lisbon who crosses 
the Douro to arrive at Oporto, and, in doing so, gets 
his first sight of this Northern Province, might almost 
come to that conclusion then and there for himself, 
as he sees this fine river running between its lofty, 
precipitous, fern-clothed cliffs, with the city of Oporto 
rising amphitheatre-wise from the edge of the river, 
which here broadens suddenly into a lagoon, reflecting 
on its still surface the confused, picturesque, multi- 
coloured architecture steeply piled, terrace over ter- 
race, to the granite hills beyond. Two miles from 
the river we reach the station of the Northern Kail- 
way, situated in the suburbs ; and even as we drive 
to it, we get a glimpse of very characteristic Minho 
scenery, which makes us wish for more. In the fore- 
ground and middle distance pine-covered hills, rich 
in their endless harmonies of subdued greens of every 
shade, from the sunlit grey-greens of the common 
pine to the indigo-green shadows thrown by the 
solid-looking umbelled heads of the darker-foliaged 
stone pine. Then the eye travels into immense dis- 
tances, filled in with great, bare, solid mountains, 



310 POKTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

peak upon peak, rosy grey where the sunlight bathes 
them, purple where the cloud-shadows fall, and fading 
in the far-off airy perspective into what seems thinner 
and more unsubstantial than the thin vapour- wreaths 
of early dawn. 

The thirty miles which separate Oporto from 
Braga are got over with such an absence of indecent 
haste, that fully two hours elapse before the journey 
is accomplished, which is a mistake on several accounts 
— first, because the traveller is sure to carry away a 
poor idea of Portuguese railway engineering when he 
has such leisure to note how wastefully the line has 
been constructed ; not ballasted with that foresight 
in making cuttings and embankments and that happy 
economy of material, which, in an engineer's eyes, 
have an aesthetic beauty of their own, but with great 
heaps of earth and stone ' shot ' here upon the way- 
side, and perhaps, but half a mile further on, a valu- 
able bit of land dug bodily out for an embankment 
— all very deplorable in its way, and a very proper 
subject for disdain to the foreign traveller. Then, 
again, the traveller — apt as all we travellers are to 
generalization — might conclude from his experience 
of this journey that the dogs of Portugal, who may 
frequently be seen racing, and generally out-racing, 
the trains, were gifted with an abnormal speed. This 
conclusion can, as we have seen, be easily corrected, 
by a reference to the time-table and a knowledge of 
the mileage. 

The railway takes us through a picturesque 
country, but by no important towns till we reach 



THE LOST CITY OF CITANIA. 311 

Braga. Here I get out. It is nearly nine, a dark, 
dimly-starlit night late in April ; and I have a drive 
of four miles before I reach, not Braga, for I disdain 
its inn and crowded streets, but the great hostelry on 
the Hill of the Bom Jesus. This hill is one of the two 
most famous Holy Places in Portugal, and one of great 
religious resort from all parts of the kingdom, and 
even from Spain, during the summer months. Up 
four miles of stiff ascent we drive : for the great inn 
built here for the pilgrims is near the very top of the 
hill, and it cannot be less than a thousand feet above the 
elevated plain on which Braga is situated. As the 
carriage creeps slowly along the winding road to the 
summit, I know that the veil of soft night air is hid- 
ing from me a series of very lovely foreground land- 
scapes. I know, too, for I have been here before, that 
at every upward turn of the road there is a grand 
panoramic extension of the great plain below, and 
that, but for the darkness, the distant hills should be 
seen to be rising tumultuously, one above the other, 
like sea waves or the airy mountains of cloudland. 
But for the present, all this is for the imagination 
only ; I shall have to wait till the moon rises, or till 
to-morrow, for the landscape. Like the famous 
Spanish fleet, ' it is not yet in sight.' 

Nevertheless, something of the charm of it comes 
to me through the dimness of the night. I know that 
we are passing at one time through woodlands ; for 
now and again the road is overarched by great oak 
trees, whose half-expanded foliage I catch in outline 
against the sky : now I know that we are passing 



312 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

through fertile, well-tilled farm-lands ; for I hear the 
soft, continuous ' churr ' of the mole-crickets — a sound 
as much associated with the early hours of southern 
nights in spring time as the cicadas' cry with the hours 
of hot sunshine — and these dainty insects love to dwell 
in the rich soil of gardens and deep ploughed fields, and 
I know therefore that we are close to such land. And 
then again the fresh scent of new-shot vine buds comes 
to me, and the richer warm fragrance of rye-fields, 
with the bloom on the ears. And now we are passing 
by a farmer's cottage, for the heavy perfume of orange- 
blossom is wafted to me, or the fainter odours of a 
wall covered with the flowers of the Banksian rose, or 
the Wistaria. All this is very delightful after the 
dusty atmosphere of the railway carriage. Then, as 
we mount higher, we get away from cultivation alto- 
gether, and pass through successive oak groves, and 
the banks are overgrown with furze and cystus, and 
rock-rose and broom, all in flower, and all betraying 
themselves by the scents they give out on the dewy 
air of night. 

A church rises against the sky near the hill-top — 
now the night is lightening a little with the rising 
moon — and opposite to the church stands a great 
dreary pile, two storeys high, like a barrack much 
more than an hotel, and yet one of the best country 
hotels in the kingdom. Till the middle of May it is' 
but half occupied, fully crammed then and thereafter, 
not by guests alone. 

Inns in Portugal are not much after the fashion of 
inns in England, France, or Germany — not such inns 



THE LOST CITY OF CITANIA. 313 

as tourists are used to find on any of the roads they 
haunt. Comfort, after the ideal of it which we have 
come to form in England, is not to be found in these 
inns — the comfort, that is, which consists in neatness, 
warmth, bright hearths, plenty of carpets and arm- 
chairs, soft beds, bustling waiters, attentive porters, 
and smart chambermaids. Not a single one of those 
qualifications is there which, in travelling bagman's 
phrase, go to the making of a 4 good house.' The 
Portuguese inn is rather of the type of the Eastern 
caravanserai. The house is large, airy, carpetless, 
with whitewash instead of wall-papers ; an arm-chair 
is unknown ; there is but one hearth, and that is in 
the kitchen ; the few waiters do not bustle, the rare 
chambermaids are barefooted, and by no means smart. 
In regard to the beds, an Englishman was once heard 
by me trying, after his first experience of them, to 
achieve a sorry jest about his host having succeeded 
in combining ' bed and board.' The beds are, in fact, 
straw palliasses ; and the inexperienced traveller who 
makes his first acquaintance with a Portuguese bed- 
room thinks that, by some mistake, a hard bran-stuffed 
pincushion has been taken from his dressing-table and 
laid upon his bed. This, however, is an error. The 
pincushion in question is the normal Portuguese 
pillow, and some prudent travellers in this country, 
having bruised their cheeks and ears against this 
little instrument of torture, in their struggles to get a 
night's rest, habitually carry real pillows in their port- 
manteau. An unworthy piece of Sybaritism ! I set 
my face against anything so unmanly. I feel as the 



314 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

Highland laird did, who, when he and his clan (on a 
cattle-lifting expedition) were bivouacking in a snow- 
storm, found that his son had rolled a snowball under 
his head for a pillow. He kicked it away indignantly, 
swearing that no son of his should indulge in such 
effeminate luxury. So do I protest against the effe- 
minacy of carrying with one the pillow of civilization. 
It marks a degenerate age. 

The Portuguese hostelry is, as I have said, some- 
what after the fashion of the Eastern caravanserai. 
The summer traveller in Portugal — and travellers do 
mostly travel in summer — is tried, not by any ele- 
mental rage in the way of wind and rain, hail or snow, 
but he is fatigued and oppressed by the heat and dust 
of the long summer day, and often his nerves are 
singularly over-excited by long exposure to the keen, 
dry air, and the unblinking glare of the Lusitanian 
sun. So he finds in the lofty rooms and cool atmo- 
sphere of the unfurnished inn great refreshment, and 
its semi-obscurity — for the sun has been kept out all 
day by thick shutters — is wonderfully soothing to his 
spirits. Also, he is never over-oppressed by offers of 
service. According to Charles Dickens the idea of 
an English inn is, that when a guest has passed its 
threshold, he should deliver himself over into the 
hands of the head waiter unreservedly and as if he 
were a new-born child, with a volition, indeed, but no 
power of realizing it except through his nurse — the 
head waiter. Nothing of the kind prevails in Portu- 
gal. ' Here,' says your Portuguese landlord, ' is 
shelter, shade, and security — a caravanserai in short 



THE LOST CITY OF CITANIA. 315 

— and I have so far conformed to modern ideas as to 
employ a cook and a bedmaker.' 

The beds we already know about ; the dinner is at 
a table d'hote. We conform so little to Gallican ideas, 
always unfashionable in Portugal, as to call it a mesa 
redonda — a round table — though dinner is invariably 
laid on a long and narrow one. Now, it is of the 
convenient nature of Portuguese cookery that the 
dishes are not appreciably the worse for being kept 
waiting ; consequently, if one arrives at any hour of 
the day or night, and says — c Quero jantar, I want 
dinner, the meal is brought in five minutes, and laid 
at a corner of the long table. The guest need not 
trouble himself about ordering it, and if he ordered 
twenty different bills of fare on twenty different days, 
he would always get the same dinner, or one with 
the same generic features. 

As travellers are often as foolishly particular 
about their dinners as about their pillows, and as I 
have no wish to inveigle any of my countrymen to 
Portugal under false pretences, I think it well to let 
them know what, if they do come, they will have for 
dinner. 

First, they will have soup, a thin consomme of 
beef, with rice, cabbages, and probably peas floating 
in it. This is followed by the piece of beef and the 
little piece of bacon which have made the soup, and 
as this soup is served up very hot, so is some degree 
of variety skilfully obtained by the bouilli always 
being half cold. Then follow several indescribable 
stews, very good to eat, but inscrutable as to their 



316 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

ingredients. After this, when one has ceased to 
expect it, comes fish broiled, almost always hake, 
which in Portuguese waters feeds on sardines, and is 
therefore a better iish than our British hake, which 
fares less daintily ; then rice made savoury with gravy 
and herbs ; after that come ' beefes,' a dish fashionable 
in all parts of Portugal, and in whose name the Portu- 
guese desire to do homage to our great nation and 
one of our national dishes, the word being a corrup- 
tion of ' beef-steaks,' and the thing itself quite as 
unlike what it imitates as its name. Then follow, in 
an order with which I cannot charge my memory, 
sweet things, chiefly made of rice ; the dinner invari- 
ably ending with a preserve of quince. 

It will be seen that the Portuguese cuisine is very 
national in its character, and perhaps the day may 
come when philosophers, having exhausted com- 
parative mythology, grammar, and philology, may 
think it worth their while to extract some of 
the lost historic life of nations from comparative 
cookery. The Portuguese cuisine, let us say, Scientia 
Coquinaria Portugallensis, will certainly be one of 
the most interesting chapters of this book of the 
future. 

The archaeology of this subject is simply that the 
Portuguese people, conservative in their tastes and 
yet open to new ideas, have borrowed from every 
nation with whom they have come into contact ; from 
the Romans their kitchen stoves — I have seen in 
Pompeii a range of fire-places, each with its blowhole 
through which to fan the embers, absolutely identical 



THE LOST CITY OF CITAN1A. 317 

with the cooking hearths of modern Portuguese 
houses — from the Moors they have got their earthen- 
ware stew-pots and the way of using them. From 
Koman times they have preserved innumerable names 
of meals, dishes, and cooking vessels ; from the 
Moors, again, the art of preserving fruits and making 
them into cakes and jellies, from them, too, come the 
names and recipes of many sweet dishes, among 
others the rebanadas, a dish as much eaten in Portu- 
gal between Christmas and the New Year as mince- 
pies with us in England. The dish is purely one of 
Southern lands, of countries ' flowing with milk and 
honey,' and of pastoral peoples, being composed of 
thick slices of wheaten bread soaked in new milk, 
fried in pure olive oil and thickly spread with honey. 
It is a dish of the nomad tribes from Arabia to 
Morocco, and is made to this day by the Moors under 
the name of rabanat or rabanadh. Then again 
contact with ourselves has given the aforesaid beef is 
to the Portuguese cuisine, and also initiated the nation 
into the mysteries of plum and seed cakes, their 
Portuguese name being still quiqui. All this is 
surely very instructive and edifying, and I regret 
exceedingly to have to leave the subject for the 
present. 

We have wandered a little from the subject of 
Portuguese inns. In them a traveller need never 
give orders to be called in the morning ; the tone of 
voice in which the internal economy of the house is 
conducted answers all the purposes of an alarum. 
At an early hour in the morning I get up to, as old 



318 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

Indians say, ' eat the morning air.' The balconies of 
the inn look westward, and command a really magni- 
ficent view. I have somewhat discounted it over- 
night, and therefore I need say the less about it now. 
Some miles below is Braga in its plain, surrounded 
by grey mountains, on which the mists of morning 
are still hanging. An hour earlier I should have 
seen their peaks sharply defined in the transparent 
air of early dawn ; now the thin mists are in 
process of absorption by the sun, or tending sky- 
wards to incorporate themselves into detached clouds 
which, as the day grows older, shall throw their 
shade-mantles on the land and make it ten times 
more lovely than before. The sun glints obliquely 
on the city of Braga at my feet, and makes a rich 
colour harmony of the red and green and yellow 
houses, showing me in clear outline the great square 
turrets of the castle dominating the other buildings, 
and bathing in its potent rays the mellow brown walls 
and towers of the old cathedral. 

At this early hour of the morning, and with the 
sun thus slanting his light over the great vine- 
covered plain country below, there is a strange thing 
to be seen, which never elsewhere have I looked 
upon; not in France, nor in Spain, nor in Greece, 
nor even in Italy, though in all these countries there 
are lands giving in the spring time much promise of • 
purple wine ; for hereabouts the yield of wine 
is famous even in Portugal, not of delicate wine that 
strangers seek after, but of a generous liquor, cool, 
wholesome, and fortifying after labour, and so 



THE LOST CITY OF CITANIA. 319 

plentiful that no man is poor enough to go without it, 
and the very mouth of the resting horse that has 
carried the traveller through the day is stained with 
draughts of red wine. Now, in spring time, when 
the sun at its rising, or just as it sets, strikes the 
land slanting wise, this is the strange sight that I see 
here — that its rays gleam hotly upon and into innu- 
merable upward-pointing young vine shoots, set with 
tender, transparent green leaves, and so brightly that 
veritably it would seem that from the earth were 
issuing not living foliage, sky pointing, but flames of 
pale greenish fire, as of burning sulphur, thrust out 
by some subterranean force — some ' cosmic energy 
divine ' — and this sight so strikes the fancy that, in 
an age of faith, a traveller telling of this in other 
lands, it might easily grow out of his relation that in 
this favoured region the kindly earth marks this 
wonderful yield of her great bounty of wine by a 
mysterious shooting forth of flames of living fire. 

To all which the sceptical and cynical reader will 
say, ' I don't believe it ! ' and I reply, ' Go to the Bom 
Jesus at the proper hour and season and see ; ' and if 
he retorts, ' Anyhow, I don't believe about the horses 
drinking wine,' I rejoin, ' Travel through the Minho 
Province, and you will see horses drinking wine and 
eating maize bread many times in a day.' 

Beaching the top of the hill, we look down west- 
ward towards Braga, and eastward towards the city 
of Gruimaraens. The mountain ridges which separate 
the two cities are those of the Falperra range, and as 
the eye travels over them it will rest on a white speck 



320 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

on an outlying spur of the mountains, about six miles 
off as the crow flies. This is a tiny chapel, dedicated 
to San Eomao, and on a certain day in the year a 
goodly number of pilgrims flock thither. To us, 
however, the interest of the chapel hill is that it is 
the site of the buried city of Citania — of the so-called 
Citania. Now, the city of Citania, if city it be, and 
Citania it be, is still a puzzle to the antiquary. Till a 
few years ago there was but a vague rumour of the ex- 
istence of ruins on the hill of San Eomao ; within that 
period archaeology owes it to Senhor Francisco Moraes 
Sarmento, of the neighbouring city of Guimaraens, 
that certain excavations have been made and explora- 
tions set on foot ; but the exertions of one antiquary, 
single-handed, against a mysterious buried city, how- 
ever energetic and enlightened he be — and Senhor 
Sarmento is both — can go but a small way to tell us 
the story of these ruins, and they are still, therefore, 
an unsolved mystery. 

The hill of San Eomao stands out boldly from the 
range of which it is a spur, and from its summit a 
view is commanded of a great level extent of country, 
through which, amid rich corn-fields and vineyards, 
wind slowly the full waters of the river Este. The 
hill itself is treeless ; its summit is some eight hundred 
feet above the plain, and the ascent is so steep that 
it takes three-quarters of an hour to climb to the top. 
Within a few hundred yards of the very highest 
point the steepness increases ; here vegetation almost 
ceases, and the surface of the ground is occupied by 
a thickly lying crop of granite boulders of all sizes 



THE LOST CITY OF CITANIA. 321 

and shapes. A very stiff climb of five minutes more 
over and round these obstructions leads to the sum- 
mit, and here we find ourselves on a comparatively 
level bit of turfy ground, fairly clear of stones, two 
or three hundred yards across. On this table-land, 
and some little way down the incline, on each side, 
are the ruins. There is very little indeed to see, and 
until Senhor Sarmento's excavations were made, an 
unobservant person might easily have walked up and 
over the hill without guessing that it had ever been 
the dwelling-place of man. The ruins have by time 
or by human hands been all nearly levelled to the 
ground, and all that was visible, till the digging be- 
gan, was here and there a portion of circular wall, 
solidly built of well quoined stone, projecting from 
the ground. 

The first thing that strikes one is that these wall 
fragments form parts or segments of complete circles. 
Wherever one of the bits of wall showed above the 
surface, Senhor Sarmento has dug, and what he has 
come upon is this : — At a depth of from two to six 
feet down, both inside and outside the segment, he 
reaches a rough pavement. That which is inside the 
circle is clearly the stone flooring of a building ; that 
on the outside, the pavement of a street. When this 
digging has taken place round the whole circle, and 
the earth and stones are removed, there is left a per- 
fectly round building about twenty-one feet in diame- 
ter, of course unroofed, and with a single doorway. 
The great majority of the remains are of this circular 
character, but to every eight or nine of the round 

Y 



322 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

towers or houses there is a square building of rather 
larger dimensions, and again there are a few detached 
walls which seem in most instances to have been built 
at the slope of the hill, simply to keep the earth and 
stones from slipping down. 

The first question one asks oneself is how the 
upper portion of these round houses was finished off, 
and how roofed in. The answer to both questions is 
to be got from the rubbish dug out from inside the 
houses. There is just material enough in the way of 
quoined stones to carry up the building another three 
or four feet high, and the fragments of a quantity of 
earthenware tiles of a curious pattern answer the 
question as to the roof. Few modern houses are 
so well roofed as these ancient buildings must have 
been, for the tiles used were broad and square, with 
their two opposite edges upturned an inch or so ; and 
being laid side by side on the roof, and a common 
convex tile (of which there are fragments also) being 
placed over the joint, a strong and perfectly water- 
tight roof would have been formed. Senhor Sarmento 
has gone to the pains of reconstructing one of the 
houses, and even of having tiles moulded for its roof 
of the very size and shape of the ancient ones. The 
building is almost certainly exact in its resemblance ; 
a tower about ten feet high to the eaves, and with a 
conical roof, the inside forming a single chamber of 
fair size — a beehive-looking structure, singularly unin- 
viting as a dwelling. Senhor Sarmento, I notice, has 
carried his tiles only half-way up to the roof apex ; 
the rest he makes of thatch, and this, I think, is a 



THE LOST CITY OF CITANIA. 323 

mistake, because if the place was a stronghold, as its 
position leads one to suppose, a straw thatch would 
certainly have invited attack by fire. 

Now, a curious point connected with the ruins is 
that, as a rule, the buildings are so crowded together 
that in some cases only three or four inches of space 
intervene between them — in one case a single finger 
would fill the space between two buildings ; and this 
is odd, because one is puzzled to understand why, 
when the builders had finished one wall, they did 
not make it serve as a party-wall between two houses. 

When the traveller has seen so much of the ruins, 
he is no true traveller if he do not begin to form his 
theories and make his guesses. Who built these 
ruins ? Who lived in them ? And why and when 
were they deserted ? 

It is obvious enough that the place was oc- 
cupied as a stronghold. So much is quite certain, for 
though there was water, no doubt, to be got by sink- 
ing a well on the top — springs still gush out in three 
or four places from among the rocks on the hillside 
— yet there could have been no other necessary of 
human life on the hill, neither corn for man, nor 
pasture for cattle, nor possibility of garden produce. 
Therefore, the dwellers here could have come but for 
one necessary, and that perhaps in rude times the 
most conducive of any to health and longevity — se- 
curity. A handful of the most unwarlike possible 
defenders of this hill top could have held it against an 
army. The tall granite boulders on the crest stand 
as thick as battlements on a castle wall, and would 

Y 2 



324 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

afford full protection to a bowman, or a slinger, or 
the hurler of a javelin ; smaller stones stand ready to 
hand, and even a child's or a woman's throw would 
send them leaping down the precipice to carry de- 
struction to an advancing host. Then, looking to the 
great agricultural plain beneath, one fancies how a 
rural population, the dwellers on it, might have flocked 
to the hill for safety at the first alarm of danger, 
using it for occasional refuge only ; but this obvious 
suggestion has to be abandoned, for the way-worn 
pavements point to a long and continuous occupation, 
so also do the many fragments of pottery. It was 
certainly therefore a dwelling for men, for women 
and children, as well as a stronghold. We can pick 
up fragments of the pitcher for water, of the jar made 
of a finer and less porous earthenware to hold oil ; 
and, though the shapes of these vessels are not such 
as the Eomans used, it is all but certain that the men 
who made them had learned their trade from the 
Eoman potters. The present writer presumes to 
speak with some little authority on this point, as 
being himself not unacquainted practically with the 
potter's art. 

Then there are women's and children's personal 
ornaments, baubles of blue and green glass ; they 
came, we know, in the stream of Phoenician traffic ; 
and there were smiths at work on the hill, for we find 
the clinkers of the forge here and there, and scraps 
of rusted iron innumerable ; and the smiths seem to 
have been men of peace rather than of war, for Senhor 
Sarmento tells me he has obtained no single warlike 



THE LOST CITY OF CITANIA. 325 

weapon of iron — neither spearhead, nor arrow, nor 
sword ; and millers ground their corn on the hill, for 
it is difficult to take two steps where the earth has 
been disturbed, without seeing the fragments of mill- 
stones ; and there were artists — or perhaps, as with 
us at home, idlers only and amateurs in art — for there 
are rough incised ornamentations on stones, and at 
least one rude representation of a human group. 

So, then, the problem is narrowing itself somewhat. 
We are agreed that it was a stronghold and a place 
of permanent abode ; but for whom, and when ? The 
when is partly answered by the fact that no single 
flint or stone implement or weapon has been dis- 
covered ; but of iron, as we have seen, very many. 
The place then was occupied in the ' Iron Age,' as 
antiquaries have it, and if I may frame a new eth- 
nological term, it was in the later Pottery Age — an 
age when unglazed pottery with close, smooth texture 
was made — that is, after the Eomans had come into 
the country ; but almost certainly the dwellers here 
were neither Eomans nor a Eomanized people. Not 
only is there not a single inscription, but the character 
of the architecture is not at all of the kind used by 
the Eomans ; the stronghold being, indeed, of that 
type which Eoman writers called an Oppidum, and 
describe as being used by the aboriginal tribes of 
Northern and Western Europe. 

Again, the incised ornamentations on the stone 
slabs are most markedly non-Christian ; and this is 
especially the case of one very conspicuous stone 
which the traveller will find on the very summit of 



326 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

the hill. A huge slab of granite, a foot or so in 
thickness, some seven feet in height and about nine in 
length, attracts the traveller's attention almost im- 
mediately. It is pierced near the bottom by a hole 
through which a boy could creep, and adorned with 
a complicated incised pattern of small circles and 
squares intertwined with much quaint artifice, and 
with straight and scroll-shaped lines. The work, 
though not strictly Eunic, is more of that character 
than anything else ; it is certainly pre-Christian, and 
the stone, from its size and importance, must clearly 
have been the work not of one man, nor of several, but 
of many — probably of the whole tribe. It was, no 
doubt, connected with some religious rite. 

It is obvious what a very important part this stone 
must play in the construction of any theory which 
the speculative tourist may form of the lost history of 
the ruins. I admit that it had its weight with me, 
and my two learned and ingenious companions, on 
the occasion of my first visit, were, I know, as much 
occupied as myself in fitting this singular stone into 
the edifices of their respective theories ; more diligently, 
apparently, even than myself, for as we descended the 
hill in silence, revolving each man the pros and cons 
of his own hypothesis, they left to me the honour of 
discovering a rare Portuguese fern, Cheiranthes frag- 
rans, growing among the boulders of the hill. 

By the time we reached the bottom of the hill our 
respective theories were fully evolved and developed 
in all their bearings, and quite ready for publication. 
What then was our consternation, what was our be- 



THE LOST CITY OF CITANIA. 327 

wilderment, what was the utter upsetting of every- 
thing in the shape of a theory when, arrived at a little 
roadside inn in the village of San Estevao at the bot- 
tom of the hill, we learned from a farmer there 
drinking a cup of wine, that the great stone was no 
' native of the rock,' but had been carried thither by 
the enthusiastic Senhor Sarmento ! 

' But,' we exclaimed, with the natural irritation 
and obstinacy of disappointed antiquaries, ' the thing 
is palpably impossible ; a road must have been made 
up the hillside on purpose ! ' 

4 A road was made,' said the farmer calmly. 

' But,' I insisted, ' it would have taken fifty oxen 
to draw that enormous stone up ! ' 

6 Not so,' said the farmer, c it took only forty- 
four.' 

The farmer further informed us that it had 
formerly stood in the porch of the parish church, and 
that Senhor Sarmento in his apparently misplaced 
archaeological zeal, had insisted upon carrying up to 
the site of his excavations this huge slab of granite, 
which I believe must weigh fully ten or fifteen 
tons ! 

Our feelings of blank dismay may be imagined : 
fortunately there was no one to laugh at us but our- 
selves. Here was a story to match the similar mis- 
adventure of Sir Walter Scott's 'Antiquary,' and 
scientific discomfiture quite as ludicrous as that which 
befel Mr. Pickwick. When should we ever have the 
heart to build up a theory, again after the ground 
had thus been so completely cut from beneath our 



328 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

feet, and all the probabilities so stupendously vio- 
lated ? 

The reader may guess that had the matter rested 
here, he would, perhaps, never have heard this story ; 
but it turned out, fortunately for our archaeological 
acumen, that the apparent blunder admitted of easy 
explanation." On my return from this expedition, I 
looked at Argote's well-known work upon Braga, 
published in the last century, and learnt therefrom 
not without a feeling of relief, that the stone was 
standing in his day on the hill itself. Senhor Sarmento, 
has subsequently told me that he knows or knows of 
the parish priest who brought it down hill for the 
adornment of his church, and it was Senhor Sarmento, 
as the farmer had informed us, who, to the lasting 
honour of all archaeologists, had caused the stone, 
which the peasantry had long known under the name 
of Pedra Formosa, to be carried up to its original 
position. 

Under these altered circumstances, I no longer 
hesitate to put forward my theory. Citania, — it is 
convenient to have a name for a place, though it is 
probable that the ruins have no true title to this one, 1 

1 The Roman historian, Valerius Maxim us, mentions the town 
of Citania, and some antiquaries have fixed its site on this hill of 
San Romao, near Braga ; the name Citania has consequently been 
given to the hill. It is not a popular name, therefore, but an 
antiquary's name. Valerius Maximus fixes Citania on a moun- 
tain in Lusitania, and praises the bravery of its inhabitants ; but 
there are more mountains than one in Portugal, and there is con- 
tention over Citania, as over the birthplace of Homer. Some six 
Portuguese antiquaries have chosen six different mountain sites for 






THE LOST CITY OF CITANIA. 329 

• — was in my opinion a stronghold, built either by the 
Celtic or by the Celt-Iberian race. It was probably 
occupied during a long period, perhaps during many 
centuries, and until after the Eomans were in posses- 
sion of the country, through Eoman times, and pro- 
bably until and after the establishment of the 
Visigoths in Portugal. All this is proved, so far as 
proof is possible in such cases, first, by the different 
kinds of masonry shown in the walls, marking differ- 
ent periods of construction ; that in the western 
portion of the ruins is of the kind known as Cyclopean, 
and here the stones are larger, the work coarser, the 
fittings and quoining less perfect than in the presum- 
ably more recent portions ; secondly, by the immense 
quantity of potsherds, their character, the absence of 
flint implements ; the presence of articles of bronze 
and iron, and lastly, the absence of Eoman inscriptions 
and of Christian symbols. It was probably destroyed 
by the Visigoths, or we should have found some token 
of the presence of this Christian people ; and that 
it was never occupied by the Moors is nearly certain, 
because there is no trace of their very characteristic 
handiwork. That it was not again occupied on the 
reappearance of the Christians in the country is 
certain, because if it had been we should have had 
some historical record of the fact. 

Now to account for the circular character of the 
buildings, with their low, thin walls, large doorways, 
and absence of embrasures — all which would have 

Citania, and a seventh — as good a man as any of them — confesses 
that he knows not where it was. 



330 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

made them quite unfit for military defence — and for 
the curious fact of their being crowded together in 
such a way as makes it clear that no sane people 
would have ventured to stand an attack in them. I 
should account for all this by supposing that these 
well-roofed, circular towers were simply granaries 
for the corn produced in the fertile plain below ; that 
the place was a depot used by the inhabitants wherein 
to store their produce, which otherwise would have 
been at the mercy of every marauding band from the 
surrounding hills. The low, circular turrets, with 
their walls uncemented, and therefore affording good 
ventilation, with their waterproof roofs to keep off 
rain, and their stone pavements to keep out vermin, 
would have been ideal granaries. The necessity of 
ventilation for grain storing would also perfectly ac- 
count for the small size of the turrets and their 
complete isolation, while yet so closely crowded to- 
gether. The square houses or mills where the 
corn was hand-ground were probably the dwellings 
of the guardians of the depot, who, no doubt, oc- 
cupied their leisure in grinding the corn they guarded. 
None of the buildings, probably, were fortresses, for 
the hill, with its natural crenelations and battlements, 
is itself a stronghold ; such as Moirosi and Secocoeni 
found in their boulder-covered mountains. 

The apparent remains are not numerous enough 
to have been a large centre of population ; but the 
spot where the chief wealth of the district was pre- 
served would, no doubt, be the main place of public 
resort. Here all the bargaining of the neighbourhood 



THE LOST CITY OF CITANIA. 331 

would have been done, all the buying and selling, all 
the petty traffic of a rude period carried on ; here, in 
the assurance of security, pedlars would have esta- 
blished their stores of foreign stuffs and toys ; here 
artificers would have built their workshops, blacksmiths 
set up their forges, the potter his wheel and his kiln 
— it would become, in fact, the bazaar of the district. 

If all these surmises be correct, a wider exploration 
may be expected to reveal plentiful signs and tokens 
of the resorting together of men and of women; or- 
naments for the women, weapons for the men, coins 
— a few have already been found by Senhor Sarmento, 
but I attach little weight to such discoveries, work- 
men are always anxious to find coins for their em- 
ployers, and in Portugal, spurious ones are only too 
common. Those which have been found, however, 
quite support my theory. 1 

So much for the buried city of Citania, one of the 
most curious and interesting places of its kind in 
Portugal ; the traveller who desires to reach it from 
the Bom Jesus, may do so in a delightful two hours' 
walk along the breezy ridges of the Palperra moun- 

1 One thing at Citania is puzzling — the great number of 
conical, or rather frustral stones found in the ruins. These stone 
pillars vary from a foot to three feet in height, and their propor- 
tions are about those of a common sugar-loaf. They are seen 
whole or in pieces all over the hill. If such stones were found 
near a temple in India or Thibet, one would know to what to 
refer them. They may perhaps denote here too some species of 
nature worship. The sculptured stone to which I have referred 
seems to bear out this view. Perhaps after all they were nothing 
but the upper stones in the querns which are so numerous on the 
hill. 



332 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

tains, part of his road lying beneath the shade of trees, 
or else he may take a carriage to Braga and proceed 
thence by road towards Gnimaraens ; a league will 
bring him to the valley of the river Este, in which 
are situated the sulphurous baths of Taipas. Thence 
he can travel two miles further by road to San 
Estevao, the village at the foot of the hill of San 
Komao. However Citania be reached the journey is 
pleasant, and if archaeology do not tempt the tourist, 
botany or entomology may. He may botanize ad- 
vantageously on the hill : two rare ferns, Cheiranthes 
fragrans, already mentioned, and Asplenium marinum 
grow, the first abundantly and close to Citania itself; 
and the very site of the ruins is the haunt of a rare 
and beautiful species of butterfly, Parnassius Apollo, 
the only spot in all Portugal where I have seen it. 

We return to the Caldas das Taipas, where the re- 
mains of Soman baths exist, and which are still 
much frequented by the modern Portuguese, for 
they inherit all the belief in the virtues of bathing 
both in the sea water and the waters of warm sulphur 
springs. The granite hills get loftier and barer of 
trees and more boulder-covered as we near Gruimaraens, 
but the geologist who is tempted by their appearance 
to climb up their steep sides will find little to reward 
him. The boulders show no trace of having been 
' erratic,' the roches moutonnees bear no traces on their 
surface of glacial action. The loose boulders, the 
' tors ' on the hill tops, and the rocking-stones piled 
often one above the other in magnificent confusion, 
are, in the rase of the boulders, only the hard nuclei 



THE LOST CITY OF CITANIA. 333 

from which the surrounding softer parts have 
weathered off; the tors and cliffs are only points and 
ledges which time cannot eat away. 

Though architects do not condescend to class 
granite as -a stone, and point to the poor architecture 
in districts where this formation is prevalent, they 
must allow that for the building of castles or towers, 
and turrets, where strength and simplicity are the 
prevailing motives, there is no material like granite. 
Its very surface, its rough granulation, its sombre 
greyness, the massive proportions of its blocks — all 
this gives it an air of grandeur, when worthily em- 
ployed, which no other stone possesses. 

In Guimaraens the traveller will have an excellent 
opportunity of judging whether this be so. Guima- 
raens is the oldest city of purely Portuguese origin in 
the kingdom. I have told in a previous chapter how, 
when the Leonese monarch sent his Viceroy Count 
Henry of Burgundy to rule in Portugal in the 
eleventh century, it was at Guimaraens that the 
Viceregal Court was held. Here the Count's son, 
Affonso Henriquez, the true founder of the Portuguese 
Monarchy, was born ; here he spent his early youth ; 
and in the wild country round Guimaraens he first 
learned the art of war, and in his very boyhood be- 
came a trusted leader of his troops in their yearly 
forays against Moor and Spaniard. 

Here, as was natural, the first great Christian for- 
tress was built, and I think that a man might travel 
from the Northern frontier river Minho to the mouth 
of the Guadiana in the furthest south of Portugal, 



334 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

and find nowhere a nobler monument of a people 
destined from the very first to great fortunes, than this 
grand, granite-built castle of their earliest king. 

The castle is simple in its structure. A thick 
curtain wall heavily battlemented, and set in each 
of its angles with turrets, surrounds a level area from 
whose centre a huge square keep rises straight as an 
arrow from the living granite rock — the very earth- 
crust itself — on which its foundations are built ; and 
so deft were the early masons, so tractable was the 
rugged granite in their hands, so perfectly squared 
and fitted in is each enormous block, that looking 
down to-day from its giddy height the traveller won- 
ders to think that eight centuries have not thrown 
the ashlar stones an inch beyond the plumb line that 
the first mason dropped. All that time has done is 
to deepen the grey of the stone, and to redden its 
surface here and there with a thin sheathing of lichen ; 
each block is still in its place, every corner sharp, 
every chisel mark, struck probably while our first 
King Henry was yet on his throne, is as fresh nearly 
as if it had touched the stone only yesterday. It is 
still not a ruin, though it has withstood the siege of 
human enemies as well as of time ; and it tells the 
story of the strong spirit of the race of men who built 
it, far more eloquently than I have read it in any 
page of native chronicler or historian. The huge, 
pointed granite blocks, each taller than a man, which 
form the battlements, still stand erect and immovable, 
giving evidence of such immense power and energy 
in the very piling up to this height of these huge 



THE LOST CITY OF CITANIA. 335 

stones, that the coldest imagination cannot, I should 
suppose, fail to be affected by it, and to reach by a 
sort of intuition at the true meaning and history of 
this fortress. It is not the story of rapine, of wrong, 
of selfish isolation and oppression of the weak, so often 
told by the ruined feudal strongholds of Northern 
Europe, but that of a united and loyal people, free 
and warlike, under congenial rulers, working out 
by the strong hand their independence against the 
oppressors of their liberty and their faith. 

In evidence of what can be made of granite, 
treated in a more purely art spirit, there is in 
Guimaraens the belfry tower of Nossa Senhora 
d'Oliveira. This fine tower is one of a kind which 
is not rare in Portugal, and which, as a rule, the very 
Vandalism of the church-restorers of the last two 
hundred years has respected. Under the evil art- 
influences which prevailed during this whole period, 
everything Gothic was denounced and, where 
possible, destroyed. That which has saved so many 
a fine building in Northern countries — the poverty 
of the restorers — did not protect the fine art work 
of older times in Portugal. From about 1600 to 
1750, or later, immense wealth was poured into the 
country from India and from South America. Much 
of it was spent in iconoclasm, and now in the larger 
and richer towns of the kingdom hardly a Gothic 
building remains. In Lisbon only one or two 
churches of a good period are to be found ; in Oporto 
but two, and those maimed of their beauties. But 
when the iconoclasts destroyed an old building, and 



336 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

built up in its stead a monstrous erection, in the 
later Renaissance style, or the Italian, or the pseudo- 
classical, or, worse than all and commonest of all 
in Portugal, in that mixture of the classical and the 
rococo which I have christened the Jesuit style — 
when they set about doing this, it fortunately either 
happened that their funds ran short, or their destruc- 
tive propensities a little failed them ; or, perhaps, the 
love of the people for the old place wherein they 
and their forefathers had worshipped found a tongue 
in indignant remonstrance. Sometimes they would 
let an old arched doorway, with its deep romanesque 
mouldings, stand uninjured ; sometimes it seemed a 
sacrilege even to them to destroy the elaborate tracery 
of a fine flamboyant window. Often they left the 
outside of some grand building, and only assailed 
the more exquisite work of the interior — as the white 
ants of tropical countries eat out the whole inside of 
valuable articles, and leave a thin outer crust, a 
mere hollow simulacrum of that which they have 
consumed. 

At Braga they have gone only so far with the 
Cathedral, and left much fine exterior work ; at 
Gruimaraens it is the same ; while in both cases the 
traveller's expectations are completely disappointed 
when he enters the building to find the heavy, 
tasteless, Italianized interior. In both these cases, 
however, and in many others, the cloisters are 
standing — though carefully whitewashed ! — and at 
Guimaraens the typical granite belfry tower is wholly 
intact — a beautiful building, graceful and stately, 



THE LOST CITY OF CITANIA. 337 

and well worth dwelling upon for an instant. It 
is a square tower on the west of the church, so 
admirably proportioned, and with ornamentation in 
such true artistic subjection to its construction, that 
the least architectural tourist in the world must stop 
to admire it, and try to understand why it is so 
beautiful. Its height is divided by three horizontal 
string-courses, and on the summit are set pinnacled 
crenelations. The upper string-course, running 
along the second course of ashlar from the top, is 
set with gargoyles ; the other two are plain. 
Between the two upper string-courses is the belfry, 
containing a peal of eight bells, two showing through 
the double-pointed arched window openings on each 
side of the tower. Each corner of the tower is 
carved in a twisted cable ornament, running per- 
pendicularly, and giving a singular air of finish and 
relief to the whole. This moulding is relieved by a 
carved grotesque head between the two upper 
string-courses, and a gargoyle half way between the 
two lower ones. Later additions to the tower are 
an outrageous little conical spire, now whitewashed, 
and an ecclesiastical coat of arms between the two 
lower string-courses, of a date not much later than 
the tower, and contemporary probably with the 
crenelated work on its summit. 

Guimaraeris is a delightful old town, full of 
rarely picturesque ' bits ' for an artist — old ' Azimel ' 
windows, telliug of Moorish influences ; narrow alleys, 
with the eaves of opposite houses all but meeting 
overhead ; colonnaded streets ; old doorways, with 

z 



338 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

queerly carved mouldings ; lights and shadows every- 
where to delight a Kembrandt, and some of the 
street vistas terminating in a grand view of the 
mountain-side, white in places with the bloom of 
fruit-trees, green with waving patches of rye and 
clover among the grey boulders ; and here and there 
the waters of rills and rivulets are seen tumbling in 
foaming cascades down the steep hillside. 

The tourist or traveller might do worse than 
make Guimaraens his headquarters for a while. 
There is now at Guimaraens an excellent hotel — 
where there used to be only very bad ones — I forget its 
name, but it is in a square nearly opposite the church 
already described, and will be known to all drivers 
and others as the Hosjjedaria Nova — the New Inn. 
There are high roads from the city in all directions, all 
leading through lovely scenery, mostly mountainous, 
to interesting cities ; and these roads are so uniformly 
good that there is not the slightest temptation to do 
what a driver in Ireland of old days once proposed 
to his fare when at last he had come to a tolerable 
mile of road, 4 Won't I drive your honour back over 
this last bit again, just for the delight of it ? ' There 
used to be, and for that matter still are, roads in 
Portugal which make this story intelligible, but in 
those about Guimaraens there is now a positive 
monotony of excellence. 

Go where he will in Portugal, the traveller should 
be provided with Murray's Hand-Book. To be sure 
there are great omissions in it, and some tilings to 
which omissions would have been far preferable — 



THE LOST CITY OF C1TANIA. 



339 



but as a guide book it is facile princeps among such 
biblia abiblia, whether English, French or German. 
It is comparatively far more useful and more trust- 
worthy than the others. I lay claim to some gene- 
rosity for saying this, for in an enlarged and amended 
edition Mr. Murray has called me some very unkind 
names, simply because I set him right in a most as- 
tounding blunder about Lucius Junius Brutus and the 
historian Livy. Mr. Murray, after correcting the blun- 
der (without acknowledgment), adventured a dreadful 
insinuation to the effect that he did not believe I 
was myself very thoroughly conversant with the works 
of Livy. Although there was nothing in my text to 
ground this very grave charge upon, I am ashamed to 
say it is well founded. I am not well read in Livy. 




CHUECH PLATE IN BEAGA CATHEDEAL. 

z 2 



340 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW, 



CHAPTEE IX. 

A PORTUGUESE COLONY. 

The ship that leaves the shores of Great Britain in 
October or November, and steers due south, does not 
leave fog and leaden skies, and cold winds, and 
driving rain and sleet well behind her until she has 
crossed the storm-vexed Bay of Biscay, and passed 
Cape Finisterre, the Land's End of Spaim Then, as 
a rule, the sky clears, the wind dies, and the sea, no 
longer lashed into surge and foam, reflects the 
serenity of the heavens in its own darker bosom. 

Travelling on south through these summer seas for 
nearly a thousand miles after leaving the Bay, we sight 
the land of our destination, the Purple Islands, as the 
ancients are fabled to have named them — Madeira 
and the islets adjacent. The first to rise from the 
sea is Porto Santo ; then, some forty miles further 
west, Madeira itself, and the Desertas Islands. 

It has been disputed whether these islands were 
indeed those anciently known as the Purple Islands, 
and it has been further questioned whether the 
epithet 'purple' is applicable to their appearance, 
or to the fact that a purple dye can be obtained 
from a lichen which still grows in great abundance 



A PORTUGUESE COLONY. 341 

at Madeira, and is known in commerce as Orchilla 
Weed. 

It requires no little exercise of faitli to believe 
that the ancients ever had discovered these islands, 
and a good deal more to accept the theory of this 
anticipation by 2,000 years of our comparatively 
modern invention of the purple orchil dye. 

If they knew the islands at all, and knew them 
as the Purple Islands, it is probable that they applied 
this name to Madeira on account of the dark and 
almost purple colour of the volcanic cliffs which 
border the sea shore, towering in places into peaks 
which mimic the turrets of a castle, in others rising 
sheer up for hundreds of feet from the water's edge 
like huge walls of masonry, or forming quaint jut- 
ting pinnacles and bosses of dark stone : so dark, 
indeed, that if, as the traveller comes near, a cloud 
happens to intercept the sun's rays, these sea-facing 
rocks look as if they had been washed with an inky 
rain. Only when the sun shines upon them do their 
true colours show — here a jasper-like red, there 
a green vivid with moss and weeds, there with 
the tones of burnished bronze, and again through 
infinite gradations of greys and violets, to where 
the line of white foam divides them from the blue 
sea. 

The ship which steers for Madeira passes the last 
promontory, the Brazen Head, and enters the little 
Bay of Funchal, safe lying for ships in all winds 
except when it blows from the south, for the hills 
behind the town rise in an amphitheatre to a height 



342 TORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

nearly as great as that of Snowdon, and keep off the 
north, the east, and the west wind not from the town 
alone, but from the whole bay. A curious sight is 
often seen from the houses of the town — a tempest- 
tossed vessel two or three miles out in the offing, 
where the billows are raised by a strong north wind, 
and the waters of the bay, meanwhile, placid as a 
mill pool. 

Landing in this sheltered spot — it is sheltered for 
nine months out of the twelve — the traveller finds 
himself in a balmy, delicious, soft and perfumed air, 
full of the sweet scents of flowers, a perpetual spring, 
an atmosphere not to be recommended perhaps for 
those who want a bracing climate, not a country 
where the late Charles Kingsley would have found 
materials or inspiration for his Ode to the East Wind, 
but a spot where the Laureate might have placed 
his Lotus Eaters, a land ' in which it seemed always 
afternoon.' 

To one newly arrived from England, the town of 
Funchal would, no doubt, present much attractive 
novelty in its non-English aspect, but to the present 
writer, not unacquainted with ' men and cities ' in 
the south of Europe, the chief attraction of the town 
is its singular cleanness. There is, of course, no 
building earlier than the end of the 15th century, 
the island only having been discovered by the Portu- 
guese in 1419 ; and regular streets, plain buildings, 
and abundant whitewash, combined with the entire 
absence of a respectable antiquity and of any his- 



A POKTTIGUESE COLONY. 343 

torical associations, make Funchal comparatively un- 
picturesque and uninteresting. 

The most experienced traveller, however, if he is 
unprepared for it, is likely to be taken aback at the 
extraordinary mode in which he is landed. Calm as 
the waters of the bay appear to be, some amount of 
surf for ever breaks upon the stony beach, responsive 
to the never-ending surge of the great ocean outside ; 
and the boatmen, as they come near the shore, turn 
the boat's stern beachwards, and, watching for a strong 
wave, let themselves be carried in by it. As the 
boat gets into the broken water, and before the re- 
ceding wave can carry her out again, they jump 
into the water and make fast the boat to a chain 
attached to a yoke of oxen, who drag the boat and 
its occupants up the somewhat steep shore and 
several yards over the shingle. This singular mode 
of disembarkation is, of course, not accomplished 
without an immense amount of splashing of water, 
vociferation, and general wrangling of every islander 
within shouting distance. 

A queer race of men are these natives of Madeira. 
Mainly of Portuguese origin, they clearly are a nation 
of half-castes, and the Negro cross is conspicuous 
in their good-natured, ugly faces, in their stature — 
they average two or three inches more than the 
Portuguese of the continent — in their shambling 
gait, and in their ill-knit frames. Their morality, 
too, is said somewhat to partake of Negro laxity. 
They are, however, by no means flagrant offenders, 
and practise only the lesser vices of pilfering and 



344 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

story-telling, compounding, as it were, for their in- 
dulgence in petty larceny and white lies by a rigid 
economy in the greater crimes. Perhaps they 
derive their standard of morality from the fact of 
their living on a very small island — Madeira is only 
forty miles long by about ten or twelve in breadth — 
for it is a noticeable fact that the dwellers on small 
islands are seldom given to marked enormity of 
criminality : a man's Nemesis being, it is to be pre- 
sumed, too certain to overtake him, in a confined 
space, to make it convenient to perpetrate any very 
great wickedness. So, it is related, the late Mr. 
Smith, proprietor and virtual king of the Scilly 
Islands, banished all the more serious offences from 
among his tenants and subjects by the simple threat 
of exiling those who should commit them, carrying 
a Draconian code so far as to make the pulling of a 
feather from his peacock's tail punishable with instant 
banishment. A code as stringent would go some 
way to depopulate the island of Madeira. 

The native Madeirans have retained few of the 
characteristics traits, either of dress or habits, which 
are still prevalent in the mother country. They 
speak a broken-down Portuguese, not immediately 
intelligible, as I have myself had occasion to observe, 
to a native of continental Portugal ; they have few 
of those traces of Moorish ways and customs, which 
are so evident to one who has observed the habits of 
the Portuguese peasantry ; and, altogether, I am in- 
clined to doubt what is generally asserted— that 
there is a large admixture of Moorish blood in the 



A POKTUGUESE COLONY. 345 

inhabitants of the island. I see, as I have said, no 
sign of it in the people's faces, and I can find no 
historical confirmation whatever of the fact. 

Throughout the sixteenth century, the period 

when Madeira was peopled by Portuguese colonists, 

and when sugar began to be extensively cultivated, 

the tillage of the land was effected by Portuguese 

labourers brought over by the large proprietors, among 

whom the island had at once been parcelled out. These 

labourers were nominally free men, whose condition, 

however, was probably very little better than that of 

Indian or Chinese coolies on tropical sugar plantations ; 

and they were supplemented by negro slaves, whose 

numbers in the seventeenth century are asserted to 

have amounted to several thousands. The hardy, 

easy-going Negro would, no doubt, quickly assimilate 

in habits and religion to the superior race, and, in 

time, intermingle ; not so the Moors, if any of that 

nationality were, indeed, at that time in slavery on 

the island. Between Moor and Christian the faith feud 

in the Peninsula was at this time more bitter than 

at any other, and any commingling of the races was 

out of the question. If there ever were Moorish 

slaves in Madeira, and I see no evidence even of 

that, there would have been too much of mutual 

repulsion between them and the Portuguese to admit 

of the two races co-existing, except as lord and 

serf, far less of their mixing their blood. 

The Madeirans, as a rule, wear no peculiar 
costume. The women, indeed, cover their heads 
with a handkerchief, but in other respects their dress 



346 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

might pass without observation in an English village. 
The men also dress like English peasants, showing 
a tendency to white ' ducks,' in imitation, no doubt, 
of sailors, and adopting the hideous ' wide-awake ' 
hat, a head covering which, originating among the 
plantation slaves of the United States, promises in 
time to spread over the whole civilised earth. Two 
eccentricities of dress, however, the Macleirans in- 
dulge in. The men, when they do not wear ; wide- 
awake ' hats, use, perhaps, the most singular head 
covering worn by any race of Christian men. In 
shape and size it exactly resembles a common tea 
saucer ; it is made of black cloth, and fits on to the 
very point of the back of the head, covering, of 
course, only about a hand's breadth of its surface, 
and being kept in place, as a resident tried to ex- 
plain to me, simply by the force of suction. This 
' carapucaj or skull cap, is put on and taken off 
by a handle made of rolled cloth, which projects 
from its centre, and stands up from the wearer's 
head ; this handle is as thin and half as long as the 
stem of a long clay pipe, and the general appearance 
of the islander with one of these caps is indescribably 
ludicrous. The Madeirans may boast of having 
evolved this remarkable head-gear within the last 
hundred years, for no notice is made of it by 
travellers visiting the island until the year 1782. 

Another peculiarity of dress is the universal 
wearing of top-boots of yellow goat's leather by 
persons of both sexes and all ages. The use of the 
Moorish slipper by the peasantry of so many parts of 



A PORTUGUESE COLONY. 347 

Spain and Portugal, is a marked vestige of Oriental- 
ism, and the abandonment by their descendants of a 
chaussure in which a man can neither run on level 
ground, nor walk up a steep hill, is, no doubt, due to 
the mountainous nature of the island, and perhaps 
to the extensive growth of the prickly pear, which 
would make walking barefoot quite impossible. The 
use of high boots is therefore sensible enough, but the 
appearance of a little girl of ten or twelve in a pair 
of top-boots is apt to strike the conventional stranger 
as singular. 

The chief interest of Madeira, however, lies 
neither in its inhabitants nor in its history, but in 
the extraordinary beauty of its scenery and the 
delicious mildness of its climate. 

In Madeira, as a health resort, I desire to express 
my strong belief. True it is that for many years 
past it has been denounced by certain medical 
authors ; every doctor who has wanted to write up a 
new winter health resort begins by attempting to 
write down Madeira, as likely to prove its most 
formidable competitor. I venture to think that 
few non-medical persons have read more about 
European health resorts or read with stronger 
interest in arriving at the strict truth in the matter 
than myself. The result of my investigations was to 
go to Madeira, and inquiries on the spot, among per- 
sons who can have had no object in misrepresentation, 
strongly confirmed my choice. The chief charges 
against Madeira, I found, as I expected, quite untenable. 
These charges are three in number : first, the preva- 



348 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

lence of the scorching Leste or Sirocco, the east wind 

which blows from Africa and comes to Madeira 

charged with the heat and dryness which reign over 

the Sahara desert ; secondly, the damp of the climate ; 

and thirdly, the frequency of rain. But it turns out 

that the Leste is never disagreeable and never 

frequent except in summer; in winter it blows but 

once or twice, and its effect at that season upon 

human beings is rather pleasant and exhilarating 

than otherwise. The dampness, so evident to the 

perceptions of those who recommend rival health 

resorts, is certainly not appreciable to the senses of 

an invalid, nor is it even cognizable to science, 

inasmuch as the hygrometer notes 72 degrees as the 

average amount of humidity in Funchal, and the 

best medical authorities give from 70 to 80 degrees 

of relative humidity as that which is most agreeable 

to human beings. As regards rain, there fall on an 

average but 29 inches in the year ; and even this 

does not represent the full freedom from rainy 

weather enjoyed by Madeira, for when rain falls in 

the island, it falls quickly and heavily, and while in 

Torquay — our very best English winter climate — 

about the same annual amount of rain descends, they 

have in Madeira but 88 days of rain in the whole 

year, while the people of Torquay have to endure no 

fewer than 155. 

This is all the foundation possessed by the three 
indictments commonly preferred against Madeira. 
On the other hand, no European climate has so mild 
;ii id equable a winter, is so free from chilling winds, 



A PORTUGUESE COLONY. 349 

sudden and excessive cold and dryness ; in no 
European station are the nights so warm, the noonday 
sun so little scorching. No European town is so free 
as Funchal from endemic or epidemic diseases — those 
diseases, that is, which range from ague and marsh 
fever to scarlet fever and typhus. At no European 
station is vegetation of all kinds so luxuriant and so 
lovely ; in no other health resort is such varied 
scenery to be enjoyed ; and in no climate, probably 
in the whole world, is it possible for an invalid to take 
so much out-door exercise in the course of the year ; 
in none is dust on the roads so absolutely unknown ; 
and, what is perhaps of more importance than any- 
thing else, in none is locomotion, by means of ponies, 
palanquins, and sleighs, so easy and so suitable to sick 
persons. 

These excellences in the Madeira climate have 
recommended it, and continue to recommend it, as a 
special resort for consumptive patients ; but it is, 
perhaps, quite as beneficial in a great variety of other 
complaints, such as renal affections, asthma, bron- 
chitis, gout, and certain forms of rheumatism, and, 
above all, in convalescence from fevers. Madeira is 
still resorted to annually by about three hundred 
English visitors ; and their number in future years 
will probably suffer no diminution, though a variety 
of circumstances have, to some extent, tended to 
diminish the repute of Madeira as a desirable and 
accessible health resort. 

Among these, the stringency of the quarantine 
laws, which are now relaxed, was at one time enough 



350 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

to deter many intending visitors ; moreover, for .some 
years, the steam communication with England was 
irregular ; and, added to all this, was the circum- 
stance I have above spoken of, the adverse and not dis- 
interested criticism of writers on some other European 
climates. To these several causes may be ascribed 
the non-increase in the number of English arrivals, 
but it is noteworthy that with foreigners of nearly 
every nationality, Madeira is in increasing esteem. 
Americans, Russians, Spaniards, and especially 
Germans, now resort to the island every year in 
increasing numbers. 

That a comparatively large island like Madeira, 
not lowly and unobtrusive, like the coral-formed 
islets of southern seas, which barely lift their soil 
above the tides, but an island composed of a moun- 
tain range, with peaks as lofty as many not disdained 
by Alpine climbers — that such an island, visible for 
scores of miles on the surrounding seas, should for so 
many centuries have remained 

'In the ocean's bosom unespied,' 

is a fact sufficiently suggestive of the timorous navi- 
gation of the ancients, and the dearth of enterprise in 
the Middle Ages. When at last the Portuguese 
found it, the exploit had become magnified into 
absolute heroism by the very fact of so little having 
previously been achieved in the field of Western dis- 
covery. Men's ignorance and their fears had peopled 
these great unknown seas with supernatural terrors. 
The discoverers braved not only the dangers of an 



A PORTUGUESE COLONY. 351 

untried navigation, but the perils of the unseen world, 
— doubly terrible to men of their age and creed. 
True, imagination had painted many delights to 
lure them on, as well as horrors to daunt them. In 
the vast expanse of this mysterious ocean were — 

' Dire chimeras and enchanted isles.' 

There was the fabulous Island of Bimini, with its 
fountain of perpetual youth, in quest of which the 
Spanish navigator, Juan Ponce De Leon sailed over 
many a weary league of sea. There was the flying 
island of St. Brandaran, where the last King of Gothic 
Spain was fabled to have found a home, and which 
was believed in and even searched for so late as the 
eighteenth century ; and there was the great 
mysterious Island of Cipango, tenanted by the ghosts 
of captive Christians, which Columbus himself did not 
despair of finding. All these might reward the navi- 
gator who should tempt fortune on the ocean which 
washes the western shores of Europe ; but before 
they could be reached, there was the terrible ' Sea of 
Darkness ' to be passed through, and this sea was 
held to extend over the very spot where the Madeira 
islands lie. Imagination had been busy in peopling 
these unknown waters with 

' Deformed monsters, 
Spring-headed hydras, sea-shouldering whales, 
Great whirlpools.' 

If there was much, therefore, to impel a brave man 
to a brave venture, there was more still to daunt 
him. 



352 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

The man who was bold enough to disregard these 
various terrors of the deep, was the Portuguese 
navigator, Da Camara, known to his comrades, and 
since to fame, as Zargo, the one-eyed or squint-eyed, 
and it was only by a kind of accident that Zargo, en- 
gaged on a voyage of discovery on the Western 
Coast, was carried by a tempest to Porto Santo. 
Leaving some of his men on this small and nearly 
barren island, Zargo betook himself to Lisbon with 
the news of his good fortune, and in the following 
year returned with two small vessels bearing colonists 
for the new discovered land. 

On his return, Zargo learned from his men that 
certain supernatural phenomena had been observed on 
the western horizon. A singular darkness constantly 
dimmed the outlook towards the setting sun ; strange 
noises from the same quarter seemed to suggest the 
existence, not far off, of some huge whir pool. The 
men began to fancy that at Porto Santo they were at 
the verge of the habitable world ; beyond it, they 
imagined, was some abysmal vortex, hidden by a 
mysterious veil of cloud and mist. When Zargo 
announced his intention of sailing westward, it is 
reported that he was advised to abstain from rashly 
attempting to penetrate a mystery which the Almighty 
had not seen fit to reveal to his creatures. Disregard- 
ing these timorous counsels, the adventurer set sail, 
and in a few hours had discovered the lovely island 
of Madeira lying in these silent seas, in all the 
magnificent luxuriance of its virgin vegetation. No 
Portuguese mariner had, as yet, seen so fair a land, 



A PORTUGUESE COLONY. 353 

or one so rich in the products of southern climes, 
whose surface was so broken and diversified with hill 
and dell, and enriched with such copious streams ; 
for the Azores and the Cape Verds were later dis- 
coveries, and Portuguese navigators only penetrated 
to Cape Nun — the southernmost limit of the present 
kingdom of Morocco — nearly twenty years afterwards. 
The island was uninhabited and densely wooded. 
Struck probably by its contrast with the treeless 
slopes of Porto Santo and the barren shores of Africa, 
they named it Madeira — the Isle of Woods. Landing 
on its south eastern shore, they set up a cross ; and 
the place is still known as Santa Cruz — Holy Cross. 
Passing westward, by the bold headland which our 
sailors call the ' Brazen Head,' from its yellow colour, 
they gave it the name, which it still bears on the 
maps, of Cape Garajao, after the sea-birds of that 
name which then tenanted the cliffs. Each point 
and cove is still known by the name which the sailors 
gave it on their first landing. Funchal and its bay 
were so called from the fennel plant — fnncho — which 
grew on its shores. At one spot, some of the men 
in wading a stream were carried off by the current, 
and with difficulty rescued by their fellows, and the 
river is known to this day as Rio dos Soccorridos, the 
Stream of the Rescued Men. A black, isolated rock 
seemed to them to stand up from the water like a 
huge beetle, and is still called the Beetle Pock, o 
Gorgulho. A little further they startled some seals, 
which rushed by them into the sea — sea-wolves they 
believed them to be — and they christened the site, 

A A 



0£ 



54 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

which now gives its name to a village, ' Camara de 
LobosJ the Wolves' Lair. 

Thus did the rocks and hills, which till then had 
perhaps heard no sound but of the wind, the wave or 
the torrent, the note of song bird or the scream of 
gull or kite, first get their baptism in human speech, 
and for the first time echo to human voices. Prob- 
ably, but not certainly, for the first time, for, passing 
over the possible fact, to which I have alluded, of 
their ancient discovery, there is a persistent tradition 
that the first actual discoverer of Madeira was one 
Eobert Machin, a native of Bristol, who, eloping with 
Anne Darfet, a young English lady of good family, 
fled by sea with his bride from her father's anger, 
intending to seek a refuge in some French harbour. 
The ship which conveyed them is related to have 
been caught in a storm and carried to Madeira, in the 
year 1346, where the lovers died. The crew, taking 
ship again, made for the mainland, and were captured 
and carried into slavery by the Moors. In Morocco 
they found a Christian fellow-captive, one Morales, to 
whom they told their story. This Morales was, long 
afterwards, delivered from captivity, and eventually 
found himself — so the tradition runs — in the service 
of the Portuguese navigator Zargo, to whom he of 
course imparted the strange history which had come 
to his knowledge. 

This is the rather romantic story which lias been 
repeated with every account of Madeira. There is 
nothing improbable in the fact of a ship being blown 
out of its course, and coming upon the Island of 






A PORTUGUESE COLONY. 355 

Madeira, or that such a vessel should have contained 
a pair of English lovers ; the improbabilities are in 
the rest of the narration. Assuming the tradition to 
have remained in its original form for sixty or seventy 
years — which is of itself not likely — it is highly im- 
probable that it should have reached the ears of 
Zargo in a credible shape, seeing that if that enter- 
prising navigator had even suspected that so fair 
an island lay within three or four days' sail of 
Portugal, he would certainly straightway have made 
his way thither, whereas he was himself blown to 
the neighbouring Porto Santo by a tempest. More- 
over, even had the account come to him as the 
vaguest tradition, he would have satisfied himself of 
its truth as soon as he had reached Port Santo, which 
lies actually within sight of Madeira on a clear day ; 
yet he did nothing of the kind, but as I have related, 
sailed homewards and postponed the actual discovery 
for a whole year, when it was all but in his grasp. 
The whole story has the flavour of a myth ; and as, 
in some sort, depriving a brave man of the credit of 
a brave deed, I reject it utterly. 1 

1 It is a fact which is singularly illustrative of the almost 
abject ignorance and even incuriosity of the most learned and 
scientific men of the century, in regard to foreign travel and 
geographical discoveries, that fifty years after the discovery of 
Madeira, an Italian poet, the friend of the ablest contemporary 
men of science, seems to have been quite ignorant that the Straits of 
Gibraltar had ever been passed. 

It is often quoted as evidence of the philosophical foresight of 
Pulci, that he makes one of his characters in the famous ' Mor~ 
gante Maggiore ' seem actually to presage the discovery of the 
New World. ' The ocean,' says the poet, ' is level through its 
whole extent, although, like the earth, it has the form of a globe. 

a a 2 



356 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

The island of Madeira is volcanic in its formation : 
sea -cliffs and rocks, inland peaks and precipices, the 
lofty mountains over 6000 feet in height and the 
smallest pebble in the brooks, have all the same 
igneous origin ; and all bear traces of having been 
cast forth, incandescent and liquid, from the great 
subaqueous furnace, and of having cooled and 
solidified in the spot where the upheaving force had 
thrown them. An idea of the natural configuration 
of the surface of the island may best be given by the 
illustration said to have been employed by Columbus 
when asked for a description of Jamaica. Crumpling 
up a piece of paper in his hands, he laid it upon a 
table as some representation of the variations of that 
island's surface — of the sharp hill ridges, of the 
sudden declivities, of the gullies and narrow valleys, 
and the innumerable and indescribable inequalities 
of the land. Such as Jamaica is, such is Madeira, 
and such are most islands of similar volcanic origin. 

This irregular contortion of the land might seem 
to possess all the elements of the picturesque, but it 
is only at first sight that its strangeness is attractive. 

Mankind in former ages were much more ignorant than now. 
Hercules would blush at this day, at having fixed his columns 
where he did. Vessels will soon pass far beyond them, and may 
perhaps reach an unknown hemisphere.' 

If we consider that Prince Henry, the Navigator, had long 
before despatched his exploring squadrons far south and far west 
of the Pillars of Hercules, and made the last of his great geo- 
graphical discoveries twenty or thirty years before Pulci wrote, 
the poet's ignorance of past maritime achievements will seem far 
more wonderful than his fortuitous anticipation of the exploits of 
Columbus. 



A PORTUGUESE COLONY. 357 

There is quite wanting in the bare volcanic rocks of 
Madeira that which constitutes true artistic pic- 
turesqueness ; that is, the alternation of a manifested 
law or order, with interruptions of it. In the out- 
bursts of lava torrents there is law indeed, but it is 
not apparent to most observers of it any more than in 
the forms of the huge clinkers that are shot out from 
an iron furnace. It is all seemingly accidental ; and 
is, indeed, as anomalous and as hideous, aesthetically 
speaking, as the distorted limbs of a monster. 

That this is so is shown by the fact that whenever 
these lava currents cease to be amorphous and begin 
to crystallize — that is, where they follow their natural 
law and take, for instance, the form of columnar 
basalt — they go to make up exquisitely lovely 
scenery, such, for example, as that of the Giant's 
Causeway in Ireland. Among the many hundred 
pictures and drawings from the master hand of 
Turner. I do not remember a single one where naked, 
amorphous, volcanic rock is represented ; it is always 
either stratified or crystalline rocks which make the 
\ bones ' of his works. But when these same 
Madeiran rocks are covered with the luxuriant 
vegetation which a volcanic soil produces, the barren 
ugliness disappears, the nakedness is clothed with 
rich and novel forms of plant-growth, so dense that 
we are only occasionally reminded that underneath 
there lies nothing better than a huge cinder-heap. 
The beauties of the island scenery are, therefore, but 
skin deep, so to say — they are on the surface and in the 
air, for there is a particular charm of aerial distance, 



358 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

and a singular richness and variety of colouring on 
the woods, the hill-sides and the shores of Madeira 
which I have seen nowhere else. 

The nature and the number of the plants which 
clothe the surface of this small island, lying as it does 
nearly three hundred miles from the nearest point of 
Africa, and more than five hundred from the nearest 
European land ; and of the birds, beasts and insects 
which find shelter upon it — in other words, the Flora 
and Fauna of Madeira — have come to acquire a fresh 
interest when regarded from the point of view of re- 
cent developments in the science of Natural History. 
It is, therefore, not a little fortunate that a botanist 
and natural historian of established European reputa- 
tion should have made Madeira his occasional residence 
for many years past. The ordinary foreign visitor to 
the island is little apt to interest himself in the more 
abstruse points involved in the partly European and 
partly African natural history of this semi-tropical 
island, upon which Mr. Lowe has written so much 
and so well. 

When it is considered that Madeira is a very 
small island, and that the visitor is more or less con- 
fined to one corner of it, the wonder is that the 
many invalids who pass the winter there do not tire 
of what is virtually an imprisonment. Yet life in 
Madeira is by no means wearisome to the chance 
visitor or to the invalid. The situation of Funchal 
upon the sea, from which the town and the highlands 
behind it rise amphitheatrewise ; the view of the 
blue waters of the bay, always lively with boats and 



A PORTUGUESE COLONY. 



359 



fishing-smacks ; the daily arrival of great ocean- 
going steamers ; the fine mountain scenery, with 
fresh vistas of jagged peaks and ravine chasms from 
every point of view, and varying hourly with every 
change of cloud and shadow ; the charming seaside 
ride and drive, known as the Caminho Novo ; the 
excellent English club and reading-room ; and, above 
all, the hospitality of the English residents ; — all these 
things help to make the visitor's time pass pleasantly. 




A MADEIRA FISHERMAN. 



GO PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 



CHAPTER X. 

CUSTOMS OF THE PORTUGUESE PEOPLE. 

Thoughtful travellers in the Peninsula are generally 
curious to find traces of the old Moorish culture in 
the land, and this curiosity is no doubt partly due to 
that Orientalism and sympathy with things Semitic, 
which is latent in all of us of northern blood who have 
read the Arabian Nights in our childhood, and have 
dreamed of genii, and calenders, and enchanted 
palaces. In the Peninsula, however, the interest and 
the curiosity in things eastern come not alone from 
any such false glamour of the fancy as this, which 
vanishes (except in a few well-noted cases) in those 
who come face to face with eastern life. Here, in 
this south-western corner of Europe, we know we 
are on the very footsteps of the vanished race who 
first, in the night of the Dark Ages, woke all the 
dormant arts of culture, who revived the long-dead 
sciences ; among whom chivalry was born, humanity 
was practised, the 'point of honour' made almost a 
point of law, and the intercourse of man with man 
softened and refined by fixed ceremonial usage. We 
are here in the land through which mainly all this 
passed to the rest of Europe, and among the very 



CUSTOMS OF THE PORTUGUESE PEOPLE. 361 

people who were the first pupils of the cultured and 
generous Saracens, who imbibed something of their 
learning, their chivalry, and their civilization, and 
overthrew them at last by the practice of some of 
the very arts they had learnt from them. It is not 
strange, then, that knowing this, strangers coming 
to the Peninsula follow out with the deepest interest 
the traces which so many hundred years have not 
nearly effaced among southern Spaniards and among 
Portuguese, and which traces are, in my observation, 
far fresher in Portugal than in Spain. 

It is interesting enough to observe how this cul- 
ture and superiority of intellectual training and 
accomplishment gave the Arabs (as we have recent 
very good reason to know these qualities always 
will give their possessors) military as well as social 
and political ascendency, and how their lessons were 
slowly imparted to the races they encountered ; how 
through the Saracens of the period of the Crusades, 
not only the whole science of the attack and the 
defence of strong places was taught to the more back- 
ward Europeans, but what was far more important, 
the peaked saddle and firm stirrup-hold, the curb 
and curb chain, the use of the lance, and the swift 
evolutions of the Oriental horsemen became known to 
the slow and unwieldy cavalry of the Peninsular kings 
and princes. This invaluable knowledge had for 
centuries settled the tenure of empire upon the 
Saracens, and when it was imparted to the conquered 
Goths, it helped mainly to turn the tide in their 
favour. 



362 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

It is not, however, upon these great causes of 
the making or the marring of empires that I wish 
now to dwell, but upon lessons taught in Saracen 
times in the domain of domestic and social life — the 
songs, the dances, the legends, the daily usages of the 
people. The Saracens had no doubt themselves much 
to learn at first from the Eomanized Goths and Semi- 
Gothic tribes of the Peninsula ; but when the tide of 
conquest rolled back those of the Christians who 
kept their independence to the fastnesses and back- 
woods of the country, culture and civilization went 
back too among them, while all the arts of peace ad- 
vanced among the Saracens in a manner which is still 
a marvel to the historian. Those of the Christians 
who remained in the country under Saracen dominion 
became semi-Saracenized, and the existence of the 
Mocarabes is proof enough how the Christians were 
won by the superior culture of the conquering race. 
In time came the long and final struggle for existence 
between the two faiths and the two races — the 
Peninsular Crusade which I have described in a pre- 
vious chapter. It was in the course of it that Chris- 
tian and Infidel came into close contact, and an 
incident of it was that the Saracens taught the un- 
couth Portuguese Cymons 4 all the sweet civilities of 
life.' 

The graver historical student may not care to 
consider whether, among other social customs, the 
Serenade is a Saracen introduction into Europe. I am 
convinced that it is, and, in spite of its name, I believe 



CUSTOMS OF THE PORTUGUESE PEOPLE. 363 

the guitar on which it is accompanied to be a modifi- 
cation of a Saracen instrument. 1 I defy any critic to 
prove that any such nightly love-song as the true 
Peninsular serenade, so accompanied, was ever 
poured forth under the windows of any lady what- 
ever, till the Saracens invaded Europe. The Greeks 
knew of nothing of the sort, their domestic institu- 
tions were quite opposed to such proceedings ; so 
indeed were, and still are, those of the Moslems them- 
selves ; but the Moslems of Spain and Portugal were 
never very strict observers of their own institutions. 
The ancient Eomans knew not of any night-sung 
passion-song, nor, to the best of my belief, did any 
barbarian nation. Again, the serenade has never 
thriven in any land beyond those countries in which 
the Arabs first taught it ; in Provence, in troubadour 
times, it was a custom ; in Italy, in Spain, and in 
Portugal it has never died out. 

The serenade in these southern countries of course 
has none of that foolish flavour of romance which we, 
who frequent the opera and have heard the serenade 
in Don Giovanni a dozen times, connect with it. It is 
nothing more than a delicate compliment to the 

1 The older-fashioned lute is, I suspect, the origin of the guitar, 
though the lute, in its latest form, was a more complicated instru- 
ment ; and the name guitar is no doubt a Romance word, and 
was coined later than the instrument was first used in Europe. 
I do not think it can be found mentioned before the Roman de 
la Rose, and there it is called guiterne. If etymology could 
quite be trusted, it was the Portuguese who first taught the 
name and use of the Arabic lute to the rest of Europe, for they 
only of European nations have preserved in Alaude its full Arabic 
name, Al ud. Even in Spanish it is shortened to laucle. 



364 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

object of a man's affections, and means no more than 
when an Englishman gives his future bride an en- 
gaged ring, a Frenchman a box of bonbons or a 
bouquet, or than when a German sends his betrothed 
a pound of knodels or a Strasburg sausage. 

Not but that the serenade is a rare thing even in 
Andalusia. The people there are not all young and 
impulsive, or incautiously trustful of themselves to 
the air of night. Even in Seville itself the guitar 
tinkles chiefly to less romantic strains than those of 
love. 

The guitar is certainly, in our critical northern 
eyes, an effeminate instrument, and a man who plays 
upon it in an English drawing-room can no more 
hope to preserve any appearance of manly dignity 
than if he were piping upon a flageolet, or blowing 
into that most ludicrous of all instruments, the flute. 
That a man should be, as well as look, sentimentally 
emotional under the painful circumstances of being 
tied by a silk ribbon to such an instrument is, 
however, clearly a matter of conventionality. In many 
parts of Portugal, men play upon the guitar naturally 
and as a matter of course : they strum as we English- 
men whistle. The peasants are universally given to 
play upon this instrument, not often, however, 
achieving more than a simple accompaniment to the 
voice, of chords and arpeggios. In the towns the 
artisans are often guitar players, and as they walk to 
and from their work in twos and threes, they lighten 
the journey with an accompanied chant or song. 
My carpenter always brings his guitar with his tools 



CUSTOMS OF THE PORTUGUESE PEOPLE. 365 

when he comes on a job. He is a fair performer, but 
my blacksmith, I think, has the lighter touch of the 
two on the instrument, and his tones are certainly 
fuller. 

When the Portuguese workman or day-labourer 
has clone his long day's work, he does not lean 
against a post and smoke a pipe — he does not favour 
any such ' contemplative man's recreation ' — nor 
does he linger in the wine-shop ; but, if it be a 
holiday or a Sunday, and in a rural district, he puts 
on a clean shirt, with a large gold or silver stud as a 
neck-fastening, and his newest hat, varying in shape 
according to locality, but always of black felt, and 
of the kind which we see in pictures of Spanish 
life. He throws over his shoulders a black cloth 
cloak, with a real gold or silver clasp. He takes his 
favourite ox-goad in his hand, as tall as himself, 
straight as an arrow, well rounded and polished, and 
bound with brass. He slings his guitar round 
his neck, and makes his way to the nearest fashion- 
able threshing-floor — the peasant's drawing-room. 
Here are gathered old and young of both sexes, 
come together for gossip, song, and dance. If it is 
the time of the Ceifa — the reaping of the maize — or 
the vintage, or, above all, the Decamisadas — the 
husking of the ears of maize — and if corn or wine 
have yielded well, then are the peasants' hearts glad 
within them, and song and dance are more than ever 
joyous. 

I cannot say that the dancing is particularly 
graceful. It is certainly chiefiy, though not entirely, 



366 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

Oriental in character, as dancing is over all the 
southern Peninsula; that is, it is slow and firm in 
movement, accentuated in time, and depends almost 
wholly upon the motions of the body and the arms. 
It has commonly been asserted that it was the Gipsies 
(who are far the best dancers in Spain or Portugal) 
who brought these dances with them from the East ; 
but I am of opinion that this is a mistake, and that 
this wandering tribe of low-caste Indians, as we must 
now take them to be proved to be, never have, in 
spite of their apologists, remembered anything worth 
the memory, for the four hundred years they have 
been among us. They have forgotten, in this com- 
paratively short period, their origin, the story of their 
own wanderings, their customs, their language and 
their religion. Why should they have remembered 
only their dances ? Besides, I have seen Gipsies dance 
in England, in France, and in Tyrol : in none of 
these countries do they dance as they do in the 
Peninsula. We may conclude that they have every- 
where adopted the national dances, and that in Spain 
and Portugal they dance not Indian but Moorish 
dances. They dance them better than the natives 
because, being by nature lazy and effeminate, their 
bodies are never stiffened by continuous labour, and 
perhaps also because they possess by race more of 
the artistic temperament. It is the same with that 
wonderful instrumental music of the Gipsies of 
Hungary, the Tsiganes. It is, according to Monsieur 
de .Bertha, beyond all doubt, not of Gipsy, but of pure 
Hungarian origin. The Gipsies, coming to Portugal 



CUSTOMS OF THE PORTUGUESE PEOPLE. 367 

long after the Moors had gone, evidently shaped into 
an art what had been till then only a diversion of the 
people. They are almost the only professional dancers 
in the Peninsula, and all that the world at large 
knows of Peninsular dancing, in the theatres of London 
and Paris, came at first from the tinkers and beggars, 
the bull-fighters and fortune-tellers of Andalusia, 
who help, with members of other less respectable 
trades, to make up the half-bred Gritano community 
— a community composed chiefly of roughs and 
idlers, swindlers and thieves. 

Oriental dancing and the dancing of northern 
peoples are as much opposed as two modes of doing 
something of the same sort can well be. One is a 
jig, the other a bolero ; one only the ebullition of 
high spirits, the other, the expression of all the emotion 
and poetry in the nature of the dancer. The Celts 
and the northern Teutons have taught the world to 
shuffle with their feet in time to lively . music ; and 
the impartial philosopher (if such a being exist) 
who sees the Scotsman, the Irishman and the English- 
man, the Dutchman, and, above all, the northern 
German, dancing their various jigs, reels, and horn- 
pipes, must always find it to be the cause of a struggle 
for gravity to behold individuals of these nationalities, 
rigid in body, grave in expression, and with no 
life and movement in them but from the knees down- 
ward. 

The Portuguese are neither an Oriental people 
nor a purely northern, nor a purely southern nation, 
but a race blending; the character with the blood of 



368 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

the North and of the South ; a nation educated in 
its youth by Moors and Arabs. Their dances par- 
take of their lineage and of their training. They 
dance a jig, and are a little absurd — they dance a 
bolero and are interesting. 

In Portuguese dancing there is nothing cold and 
conventional like the modern quadrille, or formal like 
the minuet, or at all silly like the polka of the Hun- 
garians, or in any way grotesque and offensive like 
that which has almost become the national dance of 
Frenchmen. The Portuguese are only, as I have 
said, a little ridiculous, from our point of view, 
when they stand in a circle, and dance something 
between a jig and a reel. 

Their bolero dances are simple, natural, and ex- 
pressive — expressive of youthfulness and health, and 
the exuberance of gaiety which goes with youthful- 
ness and health, and the reaction coming from rest 
after labour. That they are not always, or even often, 
graceful I admit, for we (miserable fault-seekino- 
critics that we all are who write or read books) have 
come to set up far too high a standard of graceful- 
ness of motion, getting it in theatres and where there 
are trained dancers, and these poor people are hard- 
working peasants, their muscles cramped by labour, 
their backs bowed with the carrying of burdens. 
Hard held work and good dancing are quite incom- 
patible things. 

With the dance goes the song. Though there is 
a kind of singing in parts of Portugal which has an 
undoubted Roman origin, — the melancholy, long- 






CUSTOMS OF THE PORTUGUESE PEOPLE. 369 

drawn, often unrhymed chaunting which is to be 
heard in the fields, and which often takes the form of 
a rude hexameter, — the singing at feasts and pleasure- 
gatherings is not generally of this kind. Each district 
has songs peculiar to itself, as it has costumes and 
manners and legends more or less peculiar, so slow 
and difficult was locomotion till recent times, and so 
rare the traffic and exchange of ideas in Portugal in 
its long-enduring condition of roadlessness. The 
national songs and airs of Portugal will stand com- 
parison with those of any country, and have so much 
charm in their originality, their variety and their 
sweetness, that it is a marvel to me that they are not 
as well known as those of Spain and Italy. How 
much the origin of such songs, and indeed of modern 
passion-verse generally in its lyric form, is derived 
from Arab sources, is now an old and, more or less, a 
settled question. I need not dwell upon it. Every 
good singer at a rural festival will have in his 
repertory several of such songs as these I have 
mentioned ; but if he is to become a performer of 
any local repute, he must be something more than a 
singer with a good ear and a memory. He must be 
an extempore song-maker, and it is for this depart- 
ment of song, quite distinct from Italian improvisa- 
tion, that I claim an undoubted Saracen origin. The 
irregular quatrain in use by the Portuguese improvis- 
ator e, the curious unfamiliar accompaniment, monoto- 
nous but not unmelodious, the style of the sentiments, 
ranging from passionate emotion to a gay and rather 
downright humour, the frequent reference to natural 

B B 



370 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

objects — so rare in the popular verse of other European 
countries, so common in the poetry of Semitic races — 
and above all the constant use of figurative speech 
and a certain extravagance in imagery, — all this 
points most unmistakably to the Oriental origin 
of the Portuguese peasant songs. 

Here is the lament of a girl-singer whose lover is 
a sailor. It might be a translation from Persian or 
Arabic. ' Evil be,' she sings, ' to the man who first 
invented sea-going in ships, for he is the cause that 
my eyes are rivers of tears : ' — 

Mai haja quern inventou 
No mar andarem navios, 
Que esse foi o causador 
Dos meus olhos serem rios. 

Here, again, is a quaint fancy that might occur to 
an Oriental. ' If,' says a lover, 'I had but paper 
made of gold I would buy a silver pen, I would polish 
my style, and write you a letter : ' — 

Se eu tivera papel de ouro 
Comprava penna de prata, 
Apurava os meus sentidos, 
Escrevia te uma carta. 

It was the same singer who, apparently from 
want of scholarship, gave up letter-writing, and, 
extravagantly enough, makes believe that his spoken 
declaration is really in letter form. The paper, he 
tells his mistress, on which he writes is the palm of 
his hand, his tears are his only ink, and his pen is 
taken from his heart itself : — 



CUSTOMS OF THE PORTUGUESE PEOPLE. 371 

papel em que eu escrevo 
Tii'O-o da palnia da mao, 
A tinta sae-nie dos olhos, 
A penna do coracao. 

These quatrains and those which follow are not 
literature in any sense that should be criticized by rule 
and line. They have simply been taken down from 
the mouths of the peasant singers who were thinking 
of nothing less than of being reported. A thousand 
verses as good as or better than these are sung every 
summer night in Portugal. 

The song is not always complimentary. ' When 
the cork-tree,' remarks a disdainful young lady, 
6 shall yield berries, and the bay-tree cork, then I may 
fall in love with you — if I can take the trouble : ' — - 

Quando o sovreiro der baga 
E o loureiro der cortiga, 
Entao te amarei, meu bem, 
Se nao me der a preguiga. 

I have noticed that among the Portuguese peasant 
class, women hold a very independent position. They 
work very hard, they are active and cheerful, very 
helpful in any trouble, very genial and sympathetic, 
and yet full of quick answers and mother wit. They 
know well their value in the economy of life, and 
without any clamour for impossible rights, take their 
full share of all that is attainable in that way. Their 
suitors in love are very humble and persevering, but 
the women know well what is due to their dignity. 
Here is the petition of a lover who has too much 
failed in constancy to be well received. * Let us,' he 

B B 2 



372 POKTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

asks, ' be friends again as we used to be. People 
who care for each other always forgive, not one — or 
two — but three offences : ' — 

Facamos, meu bem, as pazes 
Como foi da outra vez, 
Quern quer bem sempre perdoa 
Uma .... dims .... ate tres. 

And the girl answers, ' No, I will not be friends with 
you, as we used to be. Those who truly love commit 
neither one, nor two — far less three offences : ' — 

Nao quero fazer as pazes 
Como foi da outra vez, 
Quern quer bem nunca offeude 
Nem uma .... quando mais tres. 

The women assume a certain freedom in Portugal — 
as, for the matter of that, they often do elsewhere — 
and it is well for their lovers if they can always 
believe what is told them for their own good. ' I 
have,' says one very frank maiden, ' five lovers — three 
for the morning, two for the afternoon ; to all of 
these I tell falsehoods, to you alone I speak the 

truth : '— 

Eu tenho cinco namoros, 
Tres de manha, dois de tarde : 
A todos elles eu minto, 
So a ti fallo a verdade. 

An obviously plain girl recommends herself ingeni- 
ously : ' From the clefts on the mountain side grow 
out wild herbs and flowers. Hold fast to the herb 
as you climb up — it is strong ; leave the flower — it 
will break away : ' — 



CUSTOMS OF THE PORTUGUESE PEOPLE. 373 

Entre pedras e pedrinhas 
Nascem raminhos de salsa : 
Pega-te a feia que e firme, 
Deixa a bonita que e falsa. 

If it were not for the charges of inconstancy so 
frequently brought by the poets, love-songs would 
make duller reading even than they do. The peasant 
poets of Portugal have evidently as good reason as 
any others to inveigh against their mistresses' fickle- 
ness. In the following quatrain the disappointed 
lover attains in his bitterness almost to real epigram. 
Like most epigrams it is untranslatable : — 

Os teus olhos, 6 menina, 

Sao gentios da Guine, 

Da Guine por serem pretos, 

Gentios por nao terem fe. 

The last example I will give has bitterness in it of 

a graver sort, and wit too of still higher alloy. ' For 

love of thee,' says the singer, ' I have lost Heaven ; 

for love of thee I have lost myself — now I find myself 

left alone without God, without love, without 

thee : '— 

Por te amar perdi a Deus, 
Por teu amor me perdi. 
Agora vejo me so 
Sem Deus, sem amor, sem ti. 

It is in the centre and north of the country that I 

have chiefly heard this extempore singing and seen 

peasants dancing and singing at their desgarradas a 

viola — their village balls and concerts. It is not easy 

to give the reader an idea of the delight which these 

gatherings afford the people, of their gaiety, their 

quickness, and their ready appreciation of a jest, a 

local allusion, or the neat turning of a phrase. 



374 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

The tinkle of the guitar in the night air, the pizzicato 
of the violin, have a marvellous attraction for them, 
as I have often seen, and these simple pleasures seem 
to be quite enough to redeem the monotony of their 
long laborious days. They ask nothing better of 
life than such distraction, and, in truth, rather shame 
a looker-on who may, perhaps, foolishly ambition 
some hardly attainable object, valueless or bitter 
when he reaches it. For the thorough-going He- 
donist, who, with Mr. Pater, counts the thrills of 
pleasurable sensation in life as that which chiefly tells 
on the right side of man's account, the lines of a 
Portuguese peasant might seem to be cast upon not 
unpleasant times or places. He has, indeed, to work 
hard in a climate which is not altogether a perfect 
one. Hot suns and cold winds too often come 
together. The narrow strip of land which lies 
between the Spanish mountains and the Atlantic, and 
constitutes Portugal, is subject to fogs, and to rain 
which is almost tropical. It is an Atlantic climate, 
and our English winter sojourners in the South know 
little except of Mediterranean ones. There is a 
difference, and it is not altogether in favour of the 
climates of the Mediterranean shores. If the day 
climate of Algiers, Naples, or Messina, is better than 
that of Portugal, the evening, about sunset time, and 
the early morning, and above all, the air of night in 
this country, have a clearness and pleasantness which 
are not to be found elsewhere in Europe, and which 
are, no doubt, due to the modifying influence of the 
great ocean. The night air of summer is especially 



CUSTOMS OF THE PORTUGUESE PEOPLE. 375 

delightful — warm, soft, and genial. However hot 
and sultry the day may have been, amends are made 
at night. Once I was riding with a peasant guide, 
on a fearfully hot day, through the plain country of 
Estremadura. The afternoon sun glared into our 
faces as we rode westward, and the heat was as if a 
furnace door was being kept open above our heads. 
' When night falls,' said my guide, breaking a long 
silence, ' I shall lie out in the fields to feel the air cool 
upon me and the dew.' The very prospect seemed 
to bring refreshment to him. He did as he said he 
would, and as do many Portuguese in the hot summer 
time, and the practice speaks well of the wholesome- 
ness of the nights. So then, to sum up the good and 
bad in the Portuguese field labourer's lot — if he has 
a hot summer to toil through, he has no great severity 
of winter weather to endure ; if his summer day bring 
more than a common heat and burden, in the pleasant 
night he finds a constant respite and solace. Then 
again, there is abiding peace in the land. Hardly can 
the grandfathers in the hamlet remember the story of 
the time when men were pressed for civil war, and 
fields were ravaged, and rumours of war did, as they 
always do, more evil than even war itself; and it 
would take men of a generation further back still to 
tell the story of anything approaching the horrors of 
real warfare. ' Turtle-footed peace ! ' 6 Peace with 
her wheaten crown ! ' and so forth. When one has 
had the horrors of war brought, as we all have had 
lately, so vividly before us, one is almost tempted to 
quote these old phrases of the poets, and to approve 



376 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

their enthusiasm for Peace and Plenty. ' Ceres and 
her sheaves ! ' ' Bacchus and his attendant train ! ' it 
sounds stale and common-place, but one begins at 
last to see the sense there was in what seemed the 
sham classicalism of our schoolboy verses. Anyhow, 
Peace and her blessings are here for the benefit of 
the Portuguese land-worker. There is emigration to 
Brazil too for him if population presses ; wages also 
are rising ; so that altogether he is well off politically 
and socially. But what the Hedonist would count 
his chief good fortune is that he is blessed with a 
cheerfulness and a power of enjoying simple things, 
which no philosophy that was ever invented can 
bestow. 

The celebrated and benevolent John Howard, the 
prime mover in the reform of our then abominable 
English prison system, and whose successors have, 
in the opinion of some thoughtful persons, sometimes 
carried the humane influence of the first reformer 
into humanitarian excesses good neither for criminals 
nor for honest men, clearly knew nothing of the 
prisons and the prison system of Portugal. 1 It is 
not a good system at all points, or perhaps at many 
points, but it has this of singular and of interesting 

1 It is curious that Howard left England on his first journey 
to the Continent with the intention of visiting Portugal, a country 
which he was fated not to see till quite late in life, for he was 
captured on his way to Lisbon by a French privateer. He did 
not see Portugal and its gaols till long after he had visited those 
of nearly every European country, had made his published reports, 
and had helped to bring about the great reforms of our English 
prison system and discipline. 



CUSTOMS OF THE PORTUGUESE PEOPLE. 377 

in it, that such as it is now it has been, with not 
many changes, for hundreds of years. The great chari- 
table establishments of Portugal, which have taken 
the place of the lazar-houses of the Middle Ages, — 
models, like those of Spain, of good and liberal 
management, are more or less recent in their origin, 
and are either the work of priests, or of those 
strongly under priestly influence. The greatest of 
them, the Misericordia Hospital, which has branches 
throughout the kingdom, was founded in about 1510 
by the pious King Emmanuel. With the prisons, 
however, the priests have never much meddled, 
beyond carrying the consolations of religion to the 
sick and dying. Such as the prison is to this day 
in Morocco or Tunis, such it is in Portugal, with only 
such differences as might be expected in the appli- 
cation of a system and principles between a retro- 
grade and Moslem people, and a Christian, a humane 
and highly civilized one. As it was when Howard 
lived, so it is now with little change, and had he 
crossed the Pyrenees during his Continental travels, 
he would have found, I think, much food for reflection, 
and, not improbably, something to modify his own 
opinions. 

There is something to be said against the prison 
system established in Portugal, but there is certainly 
a good deal to be said in its favour. I do not pretend 
to decide either way, but I could heartily wish that 
some of the more hardened of our habitual rogues 
in Great Britain could be committed to a Portuguese 
gaol for at least some portion of their terms. It would 



378 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

warm the loyalty of the influential class who spend 
a portion of their lives in gaol to learn, by the con- 
trast that would be forced upon them, how well 
their comforts are looked after at home. The Portu- 
guese are as humane, if not as humanitarian, a people 
as we are — more so even, for they have combined 
humanity with logic in abolishing capital punish- 
ment, holding it to be against their consciences to let 
an irrevocable punishment follow the sentence of a 
fallible tribunal. They substitute transportation to 
the coast of Africa for hanging, though, if he had 
his choice, it may be doubted if any rational mur- 
derer would not rather elect to be hanged at once 
than to be so banished. The Portuguese, like us, 
are wishful that the lot of victims of the criminal 
law should not be too hard a one, but they do not 
set about attaining their end as we do. They do not 
warm, and feed up, and carefully clothe, and separate, 
and classify as we clo. There is, nevertheless, more 
of thought for many urgent wants of poor human 
nature in the Portuguese gaol management than in 
ours — more kindness and less comfort, more freedom 
and less system ; and yet the kindness is, perhaps, a 
mistaken kindness too. The rogue and thief in every 
country has always something of the beggar about 
him, and in Portugal, even in prison, his liberty is not 
so abridged but that he still has liberty to beg : dang- 
ling his line and basket into the stream of the outer 
world, and fishing up bread and meat and coj)per 
coins from his dungeon windows. 

There is often not a pane of glass in all a Portu-. 



CUSTOMS OF THE POKTUGUESE PEOPLE. 379 

guese prison, and every iron-grated window has its 
four or five haggard faces pressed close to the crossed 
bars — pale prison flowers turning to the light of day 
and freedom. A wholesome example to evil-doers, 
no doubt think those who manage these things ; but 
as all the main business of the convicts' lives can be 
carried on through their grated windows, as they can 
and do wrangle with their wives, court their sweet- 
hearts, borrow of their friends, libel their enemies, 
and beg of everyone — living in careless idleness, and 
making life one long game of ' prison bars ' — it may 
be doubted whether the publicity is not rather a 
familiarizer and diminisher than otherwise of the 
terrors of imprisonment. To the convict anyhow the 
weariness of confinement is lessened, and his lot can 
certainly not appear a very hard one when he is 
visibly idle and not the poorer, made a public show 
and yet not disgraced. The feeling of the outer 
world is with him rather than not. With them he is 
not for very long the rascal who robbed their orchard 
or their hen-roost, or the villain who murdered their 
grandmother, but the simpleton who was guileless 
enough to get caught. Coitadinho ! a poor devil ! 
who will come out of the gates a sadder and a wiser 
man, and be in future a more cautious criminal. 

In consequence of all this, the criminal is not so 
much held aloof from by the virtuous members of 
society as the keen moralist might desire, of which a 
striking proof came under my own observation ; for 
happening once to find myself in the chief square of 
a remote country town in company with a Portuguese 



o8U . PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

acquaintance of some social standing, we passed by 
the gaol, at one of the ground-floor windows of which 
was visible one particularly villaneous countenance. 

My companion advanced smilingly to the window, 
gave a small coin to the owner of the scowling face, 
inquired kindly after his health and that of his family, 
and after a few more friendly and genial common- 
places, shook hands with the convict and rejoined 
me. 

4 Pray, who is your friend ? ' I asked, as we walked 
on, not without a certain amount of irony, provoked 
by some lingering British prejudice in favour of a 
sterner prison discipline. 

4 Oh ! poor fellow,' said my acquaintance, 4 he is a 
man well known in these parts — a popular character ; 
has a good deal of influence.' 

' Wrongly imprisoned, no doubt,' I suggested ; 
4 or perhaps debt or some such trifle ? ' 

4 Well, no — in fact, he shot a man ; some dispute 
about land — a sudden thing — a quarrel — strong 
words and hot blood : it was either his uncle or his 
brother. ) 

4 And is this all he gets for murdering his blood 
relation ? ' 

4 Not at all — the murder was never quite brought 
home to him. He is not here for that, but for steal- 
ing ducks — a cat — a sheep ; I really don't remember 
what. Perhaps he is innocent of any of these 
animals — one can never tell ; but, knowing what one 
does about the man, one really can't altogether pity 
him.' 



CUSTOMS OF THE PORTUGUESE PEOPLE. 381 

4 One certainly cannot,' I answered. 

If I recollect rightly, my friend was at about this 
time intending to do the Portuguese equivalent of 
' standing for the county,' and some experiences of my 
own as to the condescension of English candidates to- 
wards English ruffians quite as great as this beetle- 
browed and hot-blooded person did something to 
assuage my insular prejudices. 

If it was not for the fresh air they get, and the 
unceasing charity of the outer world, the lot of the 
inmates of Portuguese gaols would be exceedingly 
disagreeable, for the management is thrifty in the 
extreme as regards bed and board, and fire and 
lighting. So that British sailors of the occasionally 
disorderly and criminal class coining to Portuguese 
ports with their pleasant memories of the comforts 
and luxury, and even dignity, of prison life in England, 
who have incautiously found their way into Portu- 
guese gaols, have been really quite glad to get out 
again. 



382 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 



CHAPTER XI. 

CONCLUSION. 

It is beginning to weigh a little on my conscience 
that I may have caused some offence to the excellent 
people who are the subject of the foregoing chapters. 
Once before, I made free in print with what seemed 
to me to be certain shortcomings in the Portuguese, 
and I was taken to task pretty severely for doing 
so. I had said that modern Portuguese poetry was, 
in comparison with the nation's own great achieve- 
ments in that line of past days, a dead thing. I might 
have said as much of certain national literatures 
nearer home, with as much truth and far less danger. 

When my observations came under the Portu- 
guese reviewer's lash, he was scornfully indignant : — 
; What ! ' was the tenor of his remark, ' is this malig- 
nant foreigner not aware that the great poet Costa, 
the immortal Silva, Pinto, — that ornament of his 
country ' — (here followed a list of some score more of 
contemporary immortals), 'still draw the breath 'of 
life in Portugal ? ' 

We English have ourselves so outgrown this sort 
of sensitiveness, and mind so little what foreigners 
say of us, that this bitterness and indignation came to 



CONCLUSION. 383 

me with a certain freshness in it. A Portuguese 
writer who had stated his opinion that Milton and 
Shakespeare had no living representatives in modern 
England might perhaps feel as I did if an English 
weekly review answered his imputation by giving a 
list of the minor poets whom it massacres weekly, 
and a catalogue raisonne of the immortal Smiths, 
Browns and Jenkinsons of modern English song. 

People who are thin-skinned about censure are 
not, unfortunately, correspondingly mollified by ap- 
probation, and hear the hint of a fault with an indig- 
nation that is none the less strong that such a hint 
is accompanied by a hundred compliments. Else I 
should be at my ease. If I have blamed, I have 
praised much oftener ; but there is no pleading a set 
off in this kind of suit. It arrests all flow of soul in a 
writer to have to think of these things while he is 
writing, and, for my part, I do habitually not think of 
them. It never struck me till just now what a scrape 
I had probably got into ; and now it is too late and 
no use to do anything but try and get out of it with 
the best grace possible. 

If I have offended my Portuguese friends by 
plain speaking, I must make my justification for it 
in certain heterodox and unscientific opinions which I 
hold upon the races of mankind — a confession of which 
opinions nothing but the present emergency should 
draw from me. The reader shall perceive at once how 
it is my ethnology that shall excuse my plain speaking. 

There are a certain number of plain men, of 
whom I am one, who refuse to entangle our under- 






384 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

standings with prevailing dogmas on ethnology, and 
are so little in the fashion that we commit ourselves 
thoroughly to none of the many conflicting theories 
on this subject to which the last twenty years have 
given birth. I know enough of such theories to 
know that not two of them fit into each other, and 
that the advocates of" each theory wrangle more and 
more as they get further back into antiquity. Scep- 
ticism which would come very badly from an 
ethnologist of any of the advanced schools is no 
offence at all from me, who am an ethnologist (if I 
deserve so learned a name) of no school at all. 

I have listened to a great deal of profound and 
complicated talk of Aryans and Caucasians and 
Indo-Europeans, and of course as an unprejudiced 
person I see that ' there is a good deal in it ;' but to 
be frank, an ethnology which teaches me that I am 
first cousin to the ' mild Hindoo ' finds me but a cold 
believer. Better at once embrace the whole human 
race and be that impossible being — a citizen of the 
world. For my own part I am altogether wanting in 
the tolerance necessary for this breadth of view, and 
my sympathies have not latitude enough to make me 
feel quite like a man and a brother towards Negroes, 
and shock-headed Papuans, and skew-eyed Chinamen, 
It is very narrow and uncharitable, but I hereby dis- 
own all my poor and distant relations, and I utterly 
disbelieve in the title of many who claim my cousin- 
ship. I am an anthropological nonconformist, and am 
not going to pin my faith to any new-fangled genea- 
logical tree found for me, as heralds find coats of 



CONCLUSION. 385 

arms for parvenus, by the last- fashionable number of 
a learned Society. 

Until things are made a good deal clearer to me, I 
refuse to trace my lineage direct to the Caucasus or 
the Himalayas. All that I can be quite sure of at 
present is, that I am a European : that is the world of 
which I constitute myself a citizen, and Europe is 
bounded for me by the nearest frontiers of Eussia and 
of Turkey, for I will admit neither Turks nor Eussians 
into my family party. 

With these limitations, I find a sufficient family 
likeness to myself wherever I go in Europe, and 
Greeks and Italians, Dutchmen, Germans and French- 
men, Spaniards and Portuguese, are all my friends 
and my kinsmen. Their ideas are my ideas, their 
logic is mine, I sympathize with their weaknesses, for I 
share them, and as often as not I agree in their pre- 
judices. In what family do the members hesitate to 
point out a relation's foibles ? Why should I then be 
shy of telling home truths to the Portuguese ? I am 
of the family party myself, and have a family right 
to speak out my mind. If we were perfectly wise at 
home, it might be a point of generosity to hold one's 
tongue, but I know of no such cause for silence. I 
confess that I like the Portuguese all the better every 
time I discover the reflection among them of some 
fine old British prejudice, and my heart warms to 
them when I find that there are, — numbers for 
numbers, — almost as many fools in Portugal as in 
Great Britain. Every discovery like this is a new 
evidence of consanguinity. 

c c 



386 PORTUGAL : OLD AND NEW. 

Here then is my apology and sufficient excuse. 
Of course there is another side of the question for 
those who hold these old-fashioned views of the 
families of nations, and so far as Portugal is concerned 
it is, to speak quite seriously, a very pleasant side, 
and no Englishman can observe without a strong 
sympathy many qualities and aspirations in the 
Portuguese akin to his own ; their loyalty to 
their king and their ancient liberties ; the constant 
ardour of independence that has marked every page 
of their history ; and their faith in good hard blpws 
for the maintenance of their national existence against 
all comers. These things are recognized as desirable 
even if they are not always attained, wherever men of 
true European blood reside ; and for my part, I 
am proud of, and claim kinship with, the nation where 
I find them : — 

TavTt)Q tol yfveijg re teal a'i/xaroc sv^ojjlul elvai. 



THE EJS T D. 



LONDON : riUNTED BY 

SPOTTIS'.VOODH AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 

AND PARLIAMENT STREET 



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386 PORTUGAL: OLD AND NEW. 

Here then is my apology and sufficient excuse. 
Of course there is another side of the question for 
those who hold these old-fashioned views of the 
families of nations, and so far as Portugal is concerned 
it is, to speak quite seriously, a very pleasant side, 
and no Englishman can observe without a strong 
sympathy many qualities and aspirations in the 
Portuguese akin to his own ; their loyalty to 
their king and their ancient liberties ; the constant 
ardour of independence that has marked every page 
of their history ; and their faith in good hard blpws 
for the maintenance of their national existence against 
all comers. These things are recognized as desirable 
even if they are not always attained, wherever men of 
true European blood reside ; and for my part, I 
am proud of, and claim kinship with, the nation where 
I find them : — 

TavrrjQ toi yf.veijg re. teal cdfiaroQ ev\Ofxai eivai. . 



THE END, 



LONDON : ntlNTED BY 

BFOTTIS'.VOODB AND CO., NKW-8TREKT HyUABE 

AND PARLIAMENT STREET 



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■d*ini i inn«T»yTB ii 





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